I thought it might be history but it turns out that it was a Romance Adventure. With Lee in Virginia, A Story of the American Civil War is the fictional story of a member of the Virginia gentry in the calvary of the Confederate Virginia Army during the civil war. The author is a prolific 19th century author of historical adventures and this one does give hints of the British point of view of the civil war and slavery.
Here it is on Amazon: With Lee in Virginia
The hero, Vincent, in With Lee in Virginia is a teenager just back home after four years in British schools. His sidekick is a plantation slave that he rescues from the boss on his family plantation near Richmond, Virginia. One thread in the story starts with Vincent interrupting a neighbor’s slave beating which gains him a friend (the slave) and an enemy (the neighbor). Another thread is about his befriending a horse that was mistreated. Then there’s the service as a calvary officer under famous Virginia generals. The romantic interest comes in when he encounters a girl with her slave nurse at a farm that was under threat by renegades. He is wounded during his rescue of her so she also rescues him as a caregiver while they escape back through enemy lines to safety in Georgia. That boss on his plantation also provides another antagonist thread that the hero has to resolve. The ending involves the creation of a sharecropping agreements with the plantation’s former slaves and a happily every after into the sunset sorta’ thing as they deal with the defeat of the Confederacy. Since Vincent goes from about age 16 to 21 during all of this, it is also a coming of age story.
All in all a nice afternoon of escape reading.
Now I need to go see if I can find other Henty novels …
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