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Civil War Interactive Discussion Board > Civil War Talk > Civil War News/ Press Releases > New Historic Novel |
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Civil War Interactive Discussion Board > Civil War Talk > Civil War News/ Press Releases > New Historic Novel |
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| New Historic Novel | Rate Topic |
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| Posted: Fri Apr 3rd, 2009 12:50 am |
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1st Post |
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theadmiralsguard Member
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New Civil War Historical Novel Built Around LETTERS OF ADMIRAL DAHLGREN’S MARINE GUARD Tucson, AZ - - When the Civil War began Charles Leaman wanted to go to war for the Union but he was too young to serve. He waited until he was 16 and looked older. Then he forged his father’s name to enlist in the United States Marine Corps. To remain in the service after his family tracked him down, Leaman promised to write home regularly. For the next three years he dispatched more than 90 letters to his prominent Lancaster County, Pennsylvania family. Following the war, the letters survived for a century in a China mission school Leaman founded as a Presbyterian missionary. The neatly scripted letters are filled with information about Leaman’s duties as a guard for Admiral John Dahlgren, Commander, South Atlantic Blockading Squadron. Now they have been thoroughly researched and form the basis of a historical novel to be released in time for the approaching Civil War Sesquicentennial. The Admiral’s Guard provides a rare eyewitness look at U. S. Marines in the Civil War. It follows Leaman’s experiences from his enlistment in Philadelphia, through duties at Washington Marine Barracks and then Brooklyn Navy Yard during the New York City draft riots. As part of a Marine battalion created by Admiral Dahlgren he participated in attacks on forts Wagner and Gregg in South Carolina; and then survived the ill-fated Navy and Marine attack to try to retake Fort Sumter. The raid failed with many sailors and Marines killed, missing, or captured. Soldiers who were to join in the attack watched from shore because the boats they were to suppose to use were stranded when the tide went out before they could board them. Charley was assigned to the admiral’s eight-man Marine Guard when he returned from the bungled Sumter raid. Events mentioned in Leaman’s letters led The Admiral’s Guard author Donald L. Collins on a ten-year research journey to develop several sub-plots about some still-controversial Civil War events. The former newspaper editor, author and public relations executive weaves these simultaneous events through the novel. He uses Leaman’s actual letters extensively, often allowing the Marine’s words to describe events he witnessed. An example is the evolving story of the development of submarines. In a letter written from Washington Navy Yard in 1863 Leaman tells Sis, “That infernal machine that was laying here like a chained dog has gone.” Further research determined that between this letter and his previous one, the Union submarine “Alligator” had been refitted with a steam engine to replace the original oars and had been ordered to join the blockade at Charleston. She sank in a storm off cape Hatteras. Later, after being appointed to the admiral’s Marine guard, Leaman wrote that he helped put a captured Confederate submariner “in irons to take him to the admiral for questioning.” The sailor had been blown off an experimental David torpedo boat following an attack on the USS New Ironsides. “The admiral called him an assassin and said he should hang him,” Leaman wrote. “He was as scared as anyone I ever saw.” This letter leads to Confederate efforts in developing the submarine CSS Hunley. The story tells of the tragic deaths of the underwater pioneers and those who took her on the historic attack resulting in sinking of the USS Housatonic; the first ship sunk by a submarine. Leaman was with the admiral when they rushed to the scene of the sinking. When the admiral’s son, Colonel Ulric Dahlgren, lost a leg at Gettysburg he recuperated on his father’s flagship. Charley’s description of the young colonel and his special crutch opens the door to a look at the controversial Kilpatrick-Dahlgren raid on Richmond. Dahlgren was killed and “secret mission” papers found on his body became a wartime controversy that is still debated today. Leaman also discusses the propriety of his boss’s obsessive search for his son’s body in Virginia when he should have been back supervising the attack on Charleston. Other incidents mentioned by Leaman give Collins the opportunity to show the Navy’s role in General Sherman’s march to the sea; the evolution of prisoner of war policies that changed from “immediate parole’ to starvation and brutality leading to tens of thousands of Union prisoners’ deaths. The admiral’s constant stream of intelligence revealed development of “coal torpedoes,” one of the Confederacy’s desperate efforts to even up the industrial north’s advantage in building powerful ironclad ships. The 450-page novel relies heavily on period newspaper accounts and Official Records of the Civil War accounts of battles and events which Leaman was privy to while accompanying Admiral Dahlgren. There are frequent cruises along the southern coast and several trips to Washington. When the war began, Dahlgren was nation’s leading naval armor expert but had never been in battle. He was a close friend of Abraham Lincoln who nagged Secretary of Navy Gideon Welles to promote him despite the secretary’s objection to Dahlgren’s lack of battle experience. Frustrated by the inability of the ironclad fleet to seize Charleston, Welles finally relented. Leaman joined Dahlgren’s guard unit shortly after the admiral took command of the blockade squadron. His letters begin to be filled with details that include prisoner exchanges, questioning of deserters, opinions of leaders, and his eyewitness accounts of sinking ships. In one letter he details the sinking of the flagship Harvest Moon that he was on when it struck a Confederate mine. “I believe Charles Leaman’s letters are the largest extant collection of an enlisted Civil War Marine. There has been little written about Marines in the Civil War and his letters provide a rare and interesting look into their activities,” Collins says. How the letters survived is a story in itself. Leaman graduated from Union Theological Seminary and started a large missionary school in Nanking, China. Following his death in 1912 his daughters kept the letters tightly bound with a ribbon. Eventually the women were forced to flee China, one because of the Japanese invasion, and the second who was deported by Chinese communists after she was freed from a Japanese prison camp. They returned to the family estate near Lancaster in the 1950s. The letters were sold at an estate sale in the 1980s. They required more than two years of delicate letter-by-letter and page-by-page separation and then transcribing of the faded, delicate handwriting. “Charley was young but educated, which shows in his details and opinions about the war and the leaders. There are numerous not-politically-correct today descriptions in his letters, but these were common in Civil War soldiers’ letters. In the novel, I use the letters unedited,” Collins says. The Admiral’s Guard will be published by Old Pueblo Publishing in Tucson, AZ, where Collins lives. Release is expected to be this Autumn. Information can be obtained at theadmiralsguard.com or by emailing oldpueblopublishing@post.com
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