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OXFORD IN THE CIVIL WAR, the stirring account of secession and war in northern Mississippi by author Stephen Enzweiler, is scheduled to go on sale September 10, 2010.
In this engaging work, Stephen Enzweiler recounts the intensely human story of the turbulent lives of the people of Oxford, Mississippi as they are drawn into secession and caught in the crossfire of a destructive civil war. It is the story of the great political figures of the day and of ordinary people. It is also the story of the extraodinary, of great courage, terrible risk and a fate that befell the southern people.
Drawn from primary sources and original accounts in personal diaries, letters, and official reports, OXFORD IN THE CIVIL WAR paints a vivid and gritty picture of life as it happened among the people of Oxford and Lafayette County during a time when the planter society prevailed in antebellum America. Within its pages, you can almost hear fire eater Lucius Lamar bellowing his secessionist rants to the crowds from the town's courthouse steps, and feel the exhilaration felt by thousands of young men as they formed the many military companies that would march off to war and immortality.
At the center of the drama emerge two prominent Oxford men - both national figures in their own right as well as virulent southern patriots: Jacob Thompson, Secretary of the Interior under President James Buchanan, and L.Q.C. Lamar, a vibrant, energetic secessionist fire-eater and pro-slavery hardliner. Both men played a part in Mississippi's secession and road to war. Yet the war inevitably was to become the destruction of one and the salvation of the other.
Also within its pages are the stories of the silent witnesses to Oxford history: the more than 8,000 slaves of Lafayette County. Theirs was a world of endless labor and systemic, ordered subjugation dating back more than 250 years. Stories of slaves like Lucindy Hall Shaw, Polly Turner Cancer and Joanna Thompson jump off the pages with a memorable vividness.
OXFORD IN THE CIVIL WAR is filled with wonderfully round characters set in an engaging narrative style that draws the reader in. Quickly, one realizes it is one of the great untold stories to come out of the war. Oxford and Lafayette County would eventually send over a third of its population off to fight the North, most of whom were young men with an average age of just 21. Among them were almost all the students of the University of Mississippi who in 1861 formed a militia company known as the University Greys. They served under Robert E. Lee and fought in every battle he engaged in. But on a summer's day in 1863, they would go down in history on the plains of Gettysburg and attain "imperishable glory."
OXFORD IN THE CIVIL WAR is written with an engaging style and told with the accuracy, vitality and keen eye of a historian. This untold story of Oxford's resilient people - both slaveholders and slaves - is an engaging work of narrative history and is a must for any historian's bookshelf.
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Release Date: September 17, 2010
Paperback: 128 pages
Publisher: The History Press, Charleston, SC
ISBN:
978.1.59629.318.2
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