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The Strange and Tragic Wounds of George Cole's America

A Tale of Manhood, Sex, and Ambition in the Civil War Era
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A gripping tale of determination, betrayal, and the struggle for dignity amid societal and personal chaos. In The Strange and Tragic Wounds of George Cole's 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 war's 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, Cole's story is straightforward: he murders their attorney, is tried (twice), and is acquitted. But in deGruccio's 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 Peter's 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.
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