"Brother William's War" follows William Coleman of Chester, S.C., through four years of service with the Sixth South Carolina Volunteer Infantry. The regiment was organized in time to watch the bombardment of Fort Sumter, and was the largest regiment - more than 350 men - surrendered by Lee at Appomattox. It fought in most of the major battles in the East and went west with Longstreet in 1863. The book is told through the tool of Coleman's wartime journal, which disappears after the war and doesn't come to light until the 1900s. It's therefore a look at the war from the soldier's level, told as things happened and not tainted by wishful thinking like so many postwar memoirs. His sister, Hanna, finds the journal, is shocked by the difference between what the soldiers told her and what the journal reveals, and opts to publish it along with her own naive essay about the war, written as part of a postwar project for the town's children.

This is fiction - fiction based on facts. Hanna and William Coleman existed, and her essay is the real thing, just as she wrote it. The details about the Sixth Regiment are as accurate as painstaking research can make them, and the details about soldier life are as accurate as painstaking recreation can make them. The author is a veteran Civil War living historian who has experienced many of the same things William Coleman and his comrades experienced.

Because this novel is based on real people and real stories, some of the proceeds will be donated to support real history. Money from the sale of "Brother William's War" will find its way to the Confederate Relic Room in Columbia, S.C., and to the Chester Historical Society in Chester, S.C.

 

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