A week left for voting in the Fresh Blood contest

My Missouri Civil War horror novel A Fine Likeness is still in the running for a publishing contract. It's a finalist in Dorchester Publishing's Fresh Blood Contest. After making it through the slush pile, I and the other eight finalists had our first chapters analyzed by the judges. Only five made it over that hurdle, and now it's up to the public to decide.

For this round the public is judging cover copy, often called the back cover blurb. The judges were pretty positive with mine, although they made some fair criticisms. Drop on by the contest website and check it out. If you like my stuff you can vote by sending an email to freshblood (at) chizinepub (dot) com with the subject line "Fresh Blood Vote: A Fine Likeness by Sean McLachlan". You should get a confirmation that you voted. Voting ends April 14.

I've put a lot of work and research into this novel, which inserts supernatural horror into real history. Jesse James even gets a bit part. I'd love to see it get into print!

You can also check out the book's fanpage here.

Voting has started in the Fresh Blood contest

Well, it's finally started. I and the other eight finalists in Dorchester Publishing's Fresh Blood Contest had our first chapters analyzed by the judges and now public voting has begun. My Missouri Civil War horror novel A Fine Likeness got off without too many slings and arrows. The chapters, judges' comments, and voting information are up on ChiZine's website.

You know, I wasn't nervous about this contest at all, even though a publishing contract is the grand prize. Perhaps organizing my trip to Ethiopia kept my mind off it, but now that voting has started I'm getting a wee bit obsessed.

You can vote by sending an email to freshblood (at) chizinepub (dot) com with the subject line "Fresh Blood Vote: A Fine Likeness by Sean McLachlan". You can insert a different title and author, of course. If you do, feel free not to tell me about it. :-P

You can also check out the book's fanpage here.

Missouri history book wins award

Earlier this year I blogged about an interesting new book on Missouri history, Mystery of the Irish Wilderness, by Leland and Crystal Payton of Lens and Pen Press. This is a fascinating account of an Irish Catholic community founded in the Ozarks that mysteriously disappeared during the Civil War. It's solidly researched and filled with the beautiful photos for which the Pyatons have become well known in Missouri.

Well, their hard work has finally paid off, and they've won a gold medal at the 2009 Independent Publisher Book Awards for Best Regional Non-Fiction.

Congratulations Leland and Crystal. You deserved it!

Outlaw Tales of Missouri Is Published!

This week TwoDot Press, a subsidiary of Globe Pequot Press, released my latest book, Outlaw Tales of Missouri. The last in what I call my "Missouri trilogy" of state history books, it covers the famous and not-so-famous characters that gave Missouri the nickname of "The Outlaw State".

I've dredged the files of the State Historical Society of Missouri to find forgotten stories and little-known facts, like the tale of the Yocum brothers, who made their own silver currency in the Ozarks that was valued more than money issued by the federal government. I've also looked at familiar tales from new angles. No book on Missouri outlaws would be complete without a chapter on the James brothers, but rather than focus on Jesse, I concentrate on his older brother Frank, who got into outlawry earlier and got out sooner. Unlike Jesse, he managed to die a peaceful death.

It's a fun read, if I do say so myself, and fans of Missouri history and the Wild West will find a lot here they like. Civil War buffs will like it too, since there are chapters on the notorious William Quantrill and a lesser-known rogue who went under the alias "Harry Truman" but who was definitely NOT related to the president from Missouri!

The book is available here. My other Missouri history books include Missouri: An Illustrated History and It Happened in Missouri.

First Battlefield Of A Black American Regiment Preserved

The Missouri Department of Natural Resources has recently aquired the site of the Battle of Island Mound and plans to preserve it as a state park. About fifty miles south of Kansas City, it was here on 29 October 1862 that the First Kansas Colored Volunteers defeated a large Confederate guerrilla force in what was the first engagement of an American black regiment.

The First Kansas had been organized by Jim Lane, a radical abolitionist senator from Kansas. The regiment was, in fact, illegal, as Abraham Lincoln had expressly forbidden him from arming blacks. Senator Lane was convinced that the only way the North would win the fight on the frontier was if it armed the black population. The First Kansas was made up of runaway slaves from Missouri and Arkansas, free blacks from Kansas, and mixed black/Indian volunteers from the Indian Territory.

The Department of Natural Resoucres plans to have the site fully open to the public in time for the Civil War Sesquicentennial in 2011.

I wrote about this battle for an issue of Missouri Life magazine several years ago and am currently pitching a book proposal on the regiment, so this comes as great news to me. Another researcher, Chris Tabor, has made an excellent website on the battle. He has also written a short monograph on the topic titled The Skirmish at Island Mound, now sadly out of print.

Getting Interviewed On Radio

If you're in the St. Louis area, you can hear me on "John Brown's Mindset" at about 1:30 p.m. local time Tuesday, January 27, on KTRS 550 AM, St. Louis. I'll be talking about Missouri history, writing, and my latest book, It Happened In Missouri. Hope you'll tune in!

Were There Black Confederate Soldiers?

There's an interesting discussion going on at the excellent Civil War Memory blog on whether or not there were really any blacks in the Confederate army. This argument has been going back and forth in academic and amateur circles for quite some time now, but with all my Civil War research, I'm not convinced that there's much truth to the story.

Historians far more knowledgeable than I agree. One researcher who studied 100,000 Confederate service records found only 20-30 identifiably nonwhite recruits. Some of these were blacks who could "pass" and once they were discovered were kicked out, which doesn't really fit with the whole "black people were welcome in the rebel army" idea. Why they joined in the first place is anyone's guess.

Of course, Confederate officers sometimes brought a slave along as an assistant, dressing them up in a uniform and giving them a bugle or drum, but that doesn't count. In March 1865, a month before Lee's surrender, the Confederacy decided to arm slaves with the promise of freedom, but only after a huge controversy in the Confederate Congress, and most states decided not to.

While this whole debate may seem silly, there's an insidious side to it. If it could be proven that large numbers of black Southerners volunteered to fight for the South, it would undercut the idea that the Civil War was fought over slavery. Well, I hate to burst the Neo-Confederate bubble, but there is no proof of any significant number of black Confederate soldiers, and the Civil War was to a great extent about slavery. It wasn't the only cause, but it was a major one.

Interestingly, while researching my book for Osprey on Guerrilla and Partisan Ranger Tactics in the Civil War, I came across a couple of mentions in the Official Records of Union soldiers being fired upon by bands of bushwhackers (guerrillas) and later finding one of the guerrillas was black. While Southern apologists would love to pounce on this as more support for their thesis, I have to point out that the term "bushwhacker" was used for any group of armed men not attached to the regular army, and Louisiana and Florida, where these incidents occurred, had plenty of bandit groups taking advantage of the chaos of war to commit crimes. These black bushwhackers may simply have been bandits.

But the controversy will continue, as is always the case when people desperately want history to be something other than what it was.