Nancy Johnson is a retired school teacher and an active author. She envisioned a trilogy of books for children about the Civil War from different points of view: a Yankee drummer boy, an African-American soldier from Boston, and a VMI cadet and young people from the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. As she explains on her website: “As a teacher I realized there was a need for historical fiction about the Civil War. I believe many of the issues which divided our country during the Civil War still touch us today.”
To mark the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, My Brothers’ Keeper: A Civil War Story for middle grade readers, will be free on Amazon on July 2, 3, and 4.
When I was a little girl, my mother read letters to me which had been written by my great, great uncles, two brothers from Rochester, New York. The brothers left home to fight in the Civil War when they were very young.
Mother kept their letters and pictures of the brothers and their little sister, Carrie, in a black box which was decorated with gold hearts and flowers. I was heartbroken when I learned that the youngest brother, George Peacock, had been killed in an ambush in Virginia while he was still a teenager.
In my young mind, I made up stories about the brothers, based partly on their letters and partly on my imagination. I think I knew then that someday I would write a story about them.
I still have the letters. They are yellow now, the edges bent down and crinkled, and the ink has faded. The letters, and the stories my mother wove as she was reading them, were the inspiration for my book My Brother’s Keeper: A Civil War Story. I used parts from the letters in the story. For example, in August 1861, my great, great uncle, Charlie Peacock, wrote:
As I passed through one of the back streets of Alexandria I saw a building 3 stories high built of brick with the sign Price Birch & Co Dealer in Slaves. It struck me as something different from anything I had ever seen before.
When you read My Brothers’ Keeper, you will find Price Birch & Co mentioned in Chapter 7, The Road to War. On my website, you can view a photograph of Price Birch & Co.
In addition to the letters and stories from my family, I did many months of research in books and by traveling to the places I was writing about. My husband and I climbed the rocky hill of Little Round Top at Gettysburg. We stood in the peaceful Virginia woods where my great, great uncle had been killed in an ambush in 1863. We found that three-story brick building in Alexandria with the lettering, Price Birch & Co Dealer in Slaves, still visible. We followed the path of Lee’s Retreat which led General Lee to Appomattox.
