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On rural Doylestown in southwest Pennsylvania, a most heart-rending story of romance that struggles to endure the furies of wartime plays out in Leslie Wayne Salsbury’s Where Valor Proudly Sleeps. Written in a staid rhythm and prose apt for that time in the nation’s history, the novel sets out with a strikingly authentic recreation of life in pre-Civil War Pennsylvania. Salsbury shows a richness of detail born out of diligent, even brilliant, research and a highly creative imagination. His characters speak out and tell us of a time and place where the most tumultuous and important battles of the Civil War were fought. On a fateful night, the two young lovers, Benjamin Wayneright and Alexandra Cadwalder, meet at a ball in the town armory. Introduced by Ben’s teacher, Mrs. McIntyre, the two immediately find out how they are meant for each other. A most romantic night ensues and starts a strong, passionate relationship that will prove equal to the coming chaos of war. It is a story of heroic love: how two young lovers find their love blooming in the crucible of war and how they became a pair of strong hearts that influenced others in their town to defend the Union cause. Before the war came, Benjamin would lose his father and Alexandra was on the verge of losing hers to “bleeding cancers.” Throughout forced separations, they remain true to each other. They survive the war but experienced firsthand the cost of preserving liberty and fighting for justice. They grow old in and around Doylestown, Bucks County. When Benjamin dies at a ripe old age, he is given a hero’s burial by the town. Alexandra soon follows to reunite with her beloved.
This innovative book examines how African Americans in the South made sense of the devastating loss of life unleashed by the Civil War and emancipation. During and after the war, African Americans died in vast numbers from battle, disease, and racial violence. While freedom was a momentous event for the formerly enslaved, it was also deadly. Through an investigation into how African Americans reacted to and coped with the passing away of loved ones and community members, Ashley Towle argues that freedpeople gave credence to their free status through their experiences with mortality. African Americans harnessed the power of death in a variety of arenas, including within the walls of national and private civilian cemeteries, in applications for widows’ pensions, in the pulpits of black churches, around séance tables, on the witness stand at congressional hearings, and in the columns of African American newspapers. In the process of mourning the demise of kith and kin, black people reconstituted their families, forged communal bonds, and staked claims to citizenship, civil rights, and racial justice from the federal government. In a society upended by civil war and emancipation, death was political.