Charles Hammer

Of Love and War: 1864: a Civil War Novel for the North Charles Hammer

Publisher Marketing: Opening as Sherman's soldiers win the Battle of Atlanta, Of Love and War: 1864 follows Billy Leidig, a young Georgia Militia deserter, as he searches for Lenora Moffat, the escaped slave girl he loves. The graycoat private blunders into a firefight and gets captured by her. Now disguised as a man and enlisted as bluecoat sergeant in the U. S. Colored Infantry, Lenora leads a wildcat black squad on one flank of Sherman's march from Atlanta to the sea. They free slaves at plantations the army itself will not reach. Despite doubts about her mission, Billy dons the uniform of a fallen Union lieutenant and joins them. At one plantation they free shackled and starving slaves hidden by their master to forestall emancipation by Union troops. The seven squad members confront a 40-man platoon of Confederates "refugeeing" a coffle of 300 slaves, marching them on a chain out of Sherman's path. The squad ambushes the platoon and emancipates the slaves-at heart-rending cost to themselves. But the sheer joy of breaking slave shackles with a cold chisel converts Billy to Lenora's cause. Hopeless about their future together, she nevertheless woos him. She teaches squad members to read by quoting sexy verses from the Song of Solomon and gazing into Billy's eyes. This book focuses on Emancipation, the great prize the North won in America's most tragic conflict. It challenges the view of most Civil War novels that gallant fighting even for a bad "Cause" is admirable. And yet the callous act of a Union general at Ebenezer creek as the novel ends foreshadows how the North, too, in coming years will fail the freed slaves. Contributor Bio:  Hammer, Charles About the Author Charles Hammer was born in 1934 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the son of warm-hearted parents. He worked his way through the University of Tulsa as a reporter and hand typesetter for the weekly West Tulsa News, news writer for KTUL radio, movie news photographer for KVOO-TV, and a carpenters helper. After U. S. Army service in Europe, he joined the Kansas City Star and did much of their reporting on the Civil Rights Movement, 1958-1972. Later he taught journalism at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. He is co-author of Unsportsmanlike Conduct, a critical history of collegiate sports; author of two youth novels for Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Me, the Beef and the Bum and Wrong-Way Ragsdale; a Civil War novel, Emancipating---Black Soldiers (and a Peckerwood White boy) Free the Slaves; a novel of elder life in a nursing home, Members of the Bored; and a Paleolithic adventure, The Scratchers. This novel, Certain Sorrows in an early form, won for the author a National Endowment for the Arts creative writing fellowship.