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Winner of the Michael Shaara Award for Excellence in Civil War Fiction, the John Eston Cook Award, and the Boyd Military Novel Award: �One of the best Civil War novels . . . McCaig�s prose is gorgeous . . . stunning.��Houston Chronicle Duncan Gatewood, seventeen and heir to Gatewood Plantation, falls in love with Maggie, a mulatto slave, who conceives a son, Jacob. Maggie and Jacob are sold south, and Duncan is packed off to the Virginia Military Institute�he will eventually fight for Robert E. Lee. Another Gatewood slave, Jesse�whose love for Maggie is unrequited�escapes to find her. Jesse finds his freedom and enlists in Mr. Lincoln�s army; in time he will confront his former masters. In his award-winning novel of the interlocked lives of masters and slaves, Donald McCaig conjures a passionate and richly textured story in the heart of America�s greatest war.