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Cort and Anne were more than cordial toward each other, and Jamie could sense a real feeling of affection between them. Anne was a beautiful woman and Cort a handsome man. After supper, Jamie left them to chat while he took a walk around the grounds. He strolled down into the slave quarters and, whenever possible, listened to the slaves talk, some of the older ones in their native tongues. Usually though, the slaves fell silent at his approach. A lot of the homes were no more than shacks, but Jamie suspected that for many, had they wanted a better place to live, they could have fixed up the shacks, for there was lumber stacked all over the place.
    But that still did not excuse slavery.
    On the walk back to the mansion, Jamie muttered to the night, “What am I doing here? I live in the West. This isn’t my fight.”
    He walked and thought for over an hour. Back at the mansion, he found that Cort had already gone to bed, and Anne to her room. Jamie was shown to his room and elected to read from the stack of newspapers he’d found in the downstairs. Many were several months old, but much of what they contained was still news to Jamie.
    Jamie read that just after the fall of Fort Sumter, a mob of angry New Yorkers had stormed the offices of the pro-Southern New York Herald and threatened to smash and destroy everything in sight if the publisher did not display the stars and stripes.
    Jamie learned that Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, had stated that war was not necessary if the North would just leave the South alone.
    Lincoln had then issued a call for seventy-five thousand men to suppress the South . . . he believed then that he could do that in three months.
    Jefferson Davis called for a hundred thousand volunteers. And they answered the call in droves. The upcoming war took on an almost mystical aura.
    Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri refused to send men to aid Lincoln, but neither would the governors of those states openly support the South.
    Confederate troops had seized the Gosport Naval Yard at Norfolk and managed to salvage the burned-out hulk of the USS Merrimack and refit it, naming it the CSS Virginia. The Confederates also seized eleven hundred heavy naval guns.
    Slowly, the battle lines were being drawn. In Florida, Fort Pickens held and beat back Rebel attacks.
    On May 20, 1861, when North Carolina finally seceded from the Union, the eleven state confederacy was complete and both sides were ready for war . . . just about.
    The Union forces at that time numbered just slightly more than thirteen thousand regular army troops. Thousands and thousands more were undergoing training at a fever pitch, but they were not yet ready for combat. Federal militias were being activated, and were on the march, such as the elite Seventh New York Militia, the Sixth Massachusetts, the Vermont Volunteers, the Guthrie Grays from Ohio, the Michigan Volunteers, the Twelfth New York Militia, and dozens of other local militia units, large and small.
    But the South had their local units as well, such as the Louisiana Zouaves, a mostly French-speaking unit, who patterned their uniforms after the famous French Zouave regiments who fought in North Africa. A few of the many others included Virginia’s Old Dominion Rifles, Sussex Light Dragoons, the red-shirted Wheat’s Tigers—another Louisiana based unit led by six-foot, four-inch, three-hundred-pound Major Roberdeau Wheat—and the South Carolina Volunteers.
    Jamie laid aside his papers and magazines and went to bed. So far there had been a lot of hot air coming from both sides, and damn little action.
    All that was about to change.
    As he was drifting off to sleep, Jamie wondered why Cort had worn such a secret smile all during and after dinner. He woke up around midnight at the sounds of a galloping horse, followed by muted conversation on the front porch. The rider soon rode off, and the great house grew dark. Sensing no danger, Jamie turned