Emancipating (Paperback) | Released: 01 Feb 2013

"Hammer has written a great war novel here, brilliantly informed on munitions and the horrors of close combat. This is a Northern novel, with echoes of Michael Shaara's 'The Killer Angels, ' but it also evokes---in the author's sympathy for poor white Peckerwoods---the bleak cracker comedies of Erskine Caldwell."---John Mort, Vietnam combat veteran and author of the award-winning novel, "Soldier in Paradise"---BREAKING SLAVE SHACKLES Black soldiers (and a Peckerwood white boy) free the slaves---that's the thrust of "Emancipating." Opening as Sherman's soldiers win the Battle of Atlanta, the action follows Billy Leidig, a Georgia Militia deserter, as he searches for an escaped slave girl he loves. The hapless graycoat private blunders into a firefight and, to his astonishment, gets captured by her. Now Lenora June Moffat is disguised as a man and fighting 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. The seven squad members ambush a 40-man platoon of Confederates "refugeeing" a coffle of 300 slaves, marching them on a chain out of Sherman's path. They defeat the platoon in a bloody battle and emancipate 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 had been educated by Quakers during an earlier sojourn in the North. Lenora teaches squad members to read by quoting sexy verses from the Song of Solomon and gazing into Billy's eyes. They confront many brutal slave owners and, strangely, one kind old white couple whose slaves refuse to accept the freedom Lenora's squad offers.In fiction, this is the truest telling ever of the damage Sherman's March inflicted on Georgia, and the reasons for it. The novel 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. "This action-packed novel presents a unique perspective on the Civil War. A white Confederate deserter joins a band of black irregular soldiers, including the woman he loves, who have escaped from slavery. Eager to free more slaves, they serve as auxiliaries to Sherman's army as it marches through Georgia. The book is a good read and will expand the horizons of its readers."-James McPherson, whose Civil War history, "Battle Cry of Freedom," won the Pulitzer prize-"This is a gripping tale of inter-racial love told against the backdrop of the closing events of the U. S. Civil War in the Western Theater. It's fiction, to be sure, but also military history in a keenly instructive format with good insight into the U. S. Colored Troops and how they were led. Personalities are sharply delineated, moments movingly described."-Herman Hattaway, co-author of "How the North Won," and "Why the South Lost"---