The Road to Picolata

During a sweltering day in 1863, 14-year-old Henry Whitlock stumbles upon a wounded Confederate soldier in the dense brush of a north Florida forest. This discovery hurls Henry into a hero’s journey to save the soldier’s life, risking his own, and leaving his boyhood behind.

Henry, the only child of Union sympathizers, enlists the help of a reclusive couple, mourning the death of their own son, to help him save the wounded Confederate.  After tending to the soldier and assisting with his surgery, Henry remains devoted to his patient, but also finds himself  seduced by the soldiering life.

Meanwhile, Henry’s deeply religious parents scramble to find their only child, setting out with a detachment of Union troops through the inhospitable and dangerous backcountry. After days of searching, the parents stumble upon a Confederate camp, only to find their son. While overjoyed to see him, tensions rise as Henry remains resolute in his decision to stay and become a Confederate soldier.

Amid the chaos and confusion of the Civil War, these intriguing characters face difficult decisions between family and friends, love and duty, life and death.

St. Augustine was founded as a military outpost by the Spanish almost 300 years before the start of the Civil War in 1861.  Small. poor, diverse, and multi-lingual, there was little military importance to the town and not much to the rest of Florida, either. Yet, in March 1862, Union forces captured Fernandina, Jacksonville, and St. Augustine with little opposition from Confederate forces.   It remained in Union hands for the remainder of the war, garrisoned by troops from Connecticutt, New Hampshire, and New York.

It's easy to think that all Southerns supported the Confederacy. We have a tendency to simplify history to make it more comprehensible for us. Yet, when we simplify, we lose important distinctions. During the secession crisis, many Southerners opposed leaving the United States and remained loyal to the Union during the war. Other Southerners became disenchanted with the war as it drug on over four long years. These are just two types of Unionists, but there are many different stripes of loyalists across the Southern states. 

Eleven Southern slave states ultimately left the United States and formed the Confederate States of America in order to preserve and protect the institution of slavery. Yet, Confederates were motivated by a host of different issues. Some were politically and economically motivated while others were pushed by their cultural attachments. There were Southerners who followed the lead of friends and families, often without deeply held convictions. of their own. Some Confederates were true believers, some ambivalent, others soon discouraged. 

The Judge in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, was asked why war endures. He answers: "It endures because young men love it and old men love it in them." This quote captures the idea behind the French phrase, rage militare, a passion for arms. War is a time of excitement, of optimism, of adventure. There's also a naivete to it, an innocence. The young men in my novel are caught up in the excitement and adventure of war; rage militaire.