A gripping tale of determination, betrayal, and the struggle for dignity amid societal and personal chaos.
In The Strange and Tragic Wounds of George Coles America, historian Michael deGruccio offers a gripping tale of ambition, self-making, and tragedy set against the backdrop of the American Civil War and its aftermath. George Cole was a once-hopeful Union soldier whose dreams of heroism and societal recognition unraveled in the chaos of war and personal betrayal at home. Haunted by the wars brutalities, Cole struggled to reclaim his dignity in a post-war nation that, in his mind, had forsaken the most deserving.
When he returned home to upstate New York after the war, Cole discovered that his wife had been seduced—or had been raped—by their family attorney. At first glance, Coles story is straightforward: he murders their attorney, is tried (twice), and is acquitted. But in deGruccios telling, the murder, like a flash of lightning, illuminates a vast landscape in striking detail. By mining court transcripts, newspapers, private letters and wills, memoirs, and military records, deGruccio pieces together a noir tale of American life in the nineteenth century, one given to desperate self-improvement.
This meticulously researched microhistory of a pained veteran explores how increasing rights for women, the end of slavery, expanding access to market goods, burgeoning towns and cities, the madness of war, and the congealing corruption in government and business brought a new birth of fraught freedom.
Michael deGruccio is an associate professor of history at Saint Peters University.
Prologue: Self-Made Tragedy Part I: Bred in the Bone 1. America, a World without Grace 2. To See Ourselves as Others See Us 3. The False Dawn of Seneca Falls Part II: Delusions of Manhood 4. Fog of War 5. George Washington, Town Destroyer 6. The Domesticated Man 7. Below the Beast 8. Tears for Uncle Tom 9. A Good Deal of Trouble 10. Point of No Return 11. The Resurrectionists 12. Mutiny 13. Family, the Inflammatory Stimulus Part III: Odyssey after War 14. Killing for Union 15. Men Who Nearly Needed God 16. Confessions 17. Mary. Wife. Self. 18. Life Imitates Art 19. Some Magnetic Power 20. Heroic Wounds 21. Rings and Friends 22. Schemes and Smoke 23. Buried on the Brow of a Hill Afterword
A gripping tale of determination, betrayal, and the struggle for dignity amid societal and personal chaos.
...ambitious and imaginative book.
— History Today
Michael deGruccio has written a haunting story of ambition, injury, jealousy, and violence in the crucible of the American Civil War. Here, with ingenious research and understated but powerful prose, is the real war that Walt Whitman worried would never get into the books.
— Edward L. Ayers, author of The Thin Light of Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America, winner of the Lincoln Prize
In this riveting tale of ambition, treachery, and power, deGruccio has written a history as gripping as any novel and as profound as anything Ive read on the US Civil War. Following one mans struggles, he narrates this conflict in all its complexities while showing how the questions it failed to resolve—about the meaning of freedom, equality, and the American dream—have become only more pressing over time.
— Frances M. Clarke, University of Sydney
Michael deGruccio has rewritten Civil War history as a murder mystery about the American dream, motivated by the successes and failures of killers and victims alike. His deeply researched odyssey of Colonel George Cole is not a biography or microhistory; it is a cultural history of America in transition and American families in pain: Black soldiers, white officers, their wives, their kin, their sins, their confessions.
— Scott A. Sandage, author of Born Losers: A History of Failure in America
This vivid account of a sordid murder explores the national creed of self-making through the many failures—professional, domestic, military, moral—endured by the hapless murderer. The strange and tragic wounds of George Washington Cole far exceeded those he received in battle and illuminate the perils of ambition in Civil War America.
— Karen Halttunen, author of Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination
