A review of The Retribution Conspiracy: The Rise of the Confederate Secret Service (Scuppernong Press, 2021) by Dr. Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr. In a world full of ever arising new conspiracy theories, one over 150 years old still intrigues us. Did the South conspire to kill Lincoln? Noted scholar and historian, Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr’s, novel The Retribution Conspiracy adds his historical research and skill as a novelist to the question and answers with a resounding, “Yes!” The Retribution Conspiracy follows the life of the protagonist, Rance Liebert, as a young man growing-up in a South that was at that time a frontier culture. It … Continue reading →
[The Confederates] temper was darkened still further by the miseries of having “to stand & wait for an hour or more” on roads “blocked up with troops,” and by the unearthly screaming, shrieking, weeping, moaning, “oaths, and execrations” which arose from the army’s ambulances as the “wagons kept the road” and the uninjured survivors “marched through the fields & woods on each side.” Occasionally, there would be “a brass band on the side of the road … playing ‘Dixie’ & ‘Maryland,’ ” but this did not do much to drown out the cries heard by John Imboden from thousands of voices in the backs of jolting wagons and ambulances