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CAPTURED FREEDOM

BY Steve Procko • POSTED ON Aug. 1, 2023

A Civil War–era photograph reveals a sprawling true story of suffering and survival in Procko’s nonfiction work.

In January 1865, Knoxville, Tennessee–based photographer Theodore M. Schleier captured an image of 12 men: nine Union officers who’d escaped Confederate prisoner-of-war camps and three Unionist civilian guides who’d risked their lives to aid the officers in their flight to freedom. The officers, who’d been taken captive over the previous year and a half, had been shuffled between several POW camps in Virginia and Georgia, including Richmond’s notorious Libby Prison, where they’d contended with insufficient rations and the proliferation of diseases such as dysentery and typhoid. Multiple escape attempts, including the excavation of a tunnel beneath Libby Prison, resulted in recapture and severe punishment. In October 1864, the officers were sent to Camp Sorghum, a hastily prepared three-acre camp in Columbia, South Carolina. Taking advantage of the inexperienced state militia guard, dozens of officers escaped, starting the next month, traveling northwest through swamps along the Saluda River. They were hidden and fed by others along the way (“The charity of the enslaved people forever changed each escapee so desperate to get home”), and they managed to evaded pursuit, finally reaching the mountains of western North Carolina, where Unionist sympathizers guided them over the state line to safety.Filmmaker and photographer Procko’s exhaustive research includes biographical sketches of the officers’ lives and service prior to, and after, their imprisonment as well as quotes from their own accounts. Although the author refers to the book as a work of narrative nonfiction in the introduction, imaginative descriptions are sparingly used, and they effectively enhance a small number of pivotal moments: “He was witnessing a near total lunar eclipse—an ominous sign at the start of a long and eventful twenty-seven hours that he would remember for the rest of his life.” The majority of the work, though, is a straightforward factual relation of the men’s harrowing experiences and of the toll on their physical and mental well-being—and it’s compelling enough to require no embellishment.

A thoroughly engaging account of trauma and resilience during the Civil War.

Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2023

ISBN: 9781737283416

Page count: 350pp

Publisher: Self

Review Posted Online: June 14, 2023

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Awards, Press & Interests

Rebel Correspondent: Independent Press Award, 2023

ADDITIONAL WORKS AVAILABLE

Rebel Correspondent

Distinguished Favorite, United States History - 2023 Independent Press Awards Rebel Correspondent by Steve Procko is the true story about a young man who joined the Confederate army seven days after his eighteenth birthday and served bravely for more than two and a half years until the war ended. He emerged as changed person. 950 days of his life ticked by during his service and survival as a Cavalry Private. Then he returned to the peaceful farm life of his youth, before all the madness. But he wasn’t just a farmer, he was also a writer. A little over thirty-six years later, he decided to tell the world about his experiences. His autobiography was serialized in the Walker County Messenger, the weekly northwest Georgia newspaper published in the town of LaFayette, Georgia, between 1901 and 1903. And then it was all but forgotten. Until Now. Shaw’s memories of the events are rich in details of the names, places, and events that he personally experienced during the Civil War. He was a son of the South, just a lowly cavalry private, one of hundreds in his regiment trying to survive day-to-day life, trying to understand the purpose of the turmoil he suddenly found himself thrown into. He was there as the 4th Georgia rode into Tennessee in early 1863, and during the brutally cold winter campaign at Knoxville and Eastern Tennessee. He was seriously wounded at the Battle of New Hope Church and witness to the wounding of his commanding officer Colonel Isaac W. Avery (who would one day become the editor of The Constitution (today known as the Atlanta Journal- Constitution) on the very same day. Recovering from his wounds, he returned to the war, and was wounded seriously again just five months later. He would suffer from the effects from these wounds for the rest of his life. His eyewitness accounts are perhaps the only written record of some of the day-to-day activities of the 4th Georgia Cavalry (Avery) that survive today. In Rebel Correspondent, Procko, brings us Arba Shaw’s complete, original account and enhances it with meticulous research of his own, uncovering the backstories of many of his Rebel comrades and offering historical perspective on places and events Shaw described so richly. The book introduces to its 21st-century audience an important in-depth first-person account of one enlisted man’s experiences in the bloodiest and most controversial war in our country’s history.
Published: Oct. 1, 2021
ISBN: 9781737283409
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