[Gutenberg 2766] • The Red Acorn

John McElroy (1846-1929) was an American printer, soldier, journalist and author, most known for writing the novel The Red Acorn (1885) and the four-volume Andersonville: A Story of Rebel Military Prisons (1879), based upon his lengthy confinement in the Confederate Andersonville prison camp during the American Civil War. It quickly became a bestseller and remained popular for the next twenty years. In 1864, he was among dozens of men captured in a skirmish near Jonesville, Virginia, by Confederate cavalrymen under William E. Jones. McElroy was sent to a variety of camps before being assigned to Andersonville prison, where he remained for the rest of the war. After the war ended, McElroy was released from captivity and transported back to the North. He settled in Chicago and resumed the printer's trade. He became a local reporter and newspaperman before moving to Toledo, Ohio, to become an editor of the Toledo Blade. In 1908, McElroy wrote The Economic Functions of Vice. The following year, he published Struggle for Missouri, a history of the bitter division over slavery that split the state's loyalties and led to armed conflict within its borders.