THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN FROM hundreds of pages of notes compiled by a well-known newsman of the nineteenth century, Clay Pendleton. In the late 1880s, Jonathan Stapleton hired Pendleton to go to Keyport and find out what had happened to his younger brother in Kentucky and Indiana in the summer of 1864. These notes were intended to supplement a cryptic letter Paul wrote to Jonathan shortly before he was killed at Nashville. Janet Todd Jameson was especially forthcoming. By the time of Pendleton’s visit, she had became a well-known novelist, distinguished by her sympathetic characterizations of black as well as white Americans. She also helped her husband, Adam Jameson, write a best-selling book about his Civil War adventures, Morgan’s Partisan Rangers. Amelia Gentry, by that time a widow, gave Pendleton access to Henry Gentry’s papers, including his letters to and from President Lincoln. Pendleton also tracked down Moses Washington in California, where he and Lucy retired after his service with the U.S. Army.
All the principals required Pendleton to promise that nothing would be published during their lifetimes. The interviews lay in a vault in the Stapletons’ New Jersey home, Bowood, until last year, when novelist and historian Thomas Fleming put the material into the form you have just read. He worked under a grant from the Principia Foundation, set up by the late Paul Stapleton (the grandnephew of the protagonist in this tragic story) to
make his descendants—and other Americans—more aware of their family’s and their country’s complex and often conflicted history.
James Kilpatrick,
President,
Principia Foundation