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Having grown up in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, I’ve read a lot of Civil War books. “Gone with the Wind,” of course. But also most of Bruce Catton, and Michael Shaara’s “The Killer Angels,” and later, Kent Gramm’s “Gettysburg: A Meditation on War and Values,” Tony Horowitz’s “Confederates in the Attic” and Charles Frazier’s “Cold Mountain.”
But the late Donald McCaig’s “Jacob’s Ladder” is hands-down my favorite.
As the 160th anniversary of the firing on Fort Sumter approaches, now is a fine time to discover/re-discover this novel.
Based on a sliver of history from McCaig’s western Virginia farm, “Jacob’s Ladder” follows the fates of the Gatewood family and their slaves as the Civil War looms and then expands up and down the Shenandoah Valley and east to Richmond and the coast. What’s striking about McCaig’s handling of the war is that it is both tactically precise and character-driven. You’ll learn as much about the minds of Black Union soldiers and plantation wives, sons and daughters as you will about troop movement and munitions.
I’d be hard-pressed to choose a favorite passage in this book. But the scene in which a few Black Union troops consider the recently delivered Gettysburg Address is more than memorable—it’s timely. Having listened to the final phrase of Lincoln’s speech—“’…and that government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from the earth’”—one soldier asks, “Jesse, are we ‘the people?’”
“’Not yet,’” he said.
So read “Jacob’s Ladder” for its detailed history and sympathetic characters, both Black and white. For its take on love and hate, war and peace. And know that McCaig was ahead of his time with the questions asked and the answers given.
Donald McCaig. Jacob’s Ladder. (W.W. Norton & Company, 1998; Penguin Books, 1999) 525 pp.
The story above appears in our March/April 2021 issue.
