Alva C. Roach

A Yankee in Rebel Prisons Alva C. Roach

This fascinating work by Lt Alva C. Roach, completed and published in the year 1865, is surely one of the most descriptive of many personal journals written during the years of America's terrible Civil War. His depictions are so detailed and compelling as to make the reader feel as though we were there with him and our forefathers during his battles and two years in Rebel prisons. Lt Roach's book, though, is uncommon in another way. He declared his work unvarnished truth, and much appears so. Yet, his words ring constantly with far more, oozing a remarkable hatred and vilification toward Americans of the South. In fact, he often refers to them sneeringly as "the chivalry." Roach often proclaims Southerners as traitors, murderers, fiends, villains, and robbers...rather than as they were, devoted Americans who dearly loved this Nation and its freedoms, for which they were the major founding force. So...here is a caution. If your heritage is of Southern origin you may find Lt. Roach's condemnation quite disconcerting, even while reveling in his powerful, eyewitness-to-history description. Today, it seems no longer that "Rebels" reside just in the "South." Americans who completely fathom and believe deeply in the original words of our Constitution, and the ideas of our Founding Fathers, (opposite the prosperity-less, murderous, devastation of big government, Communist-like, control) are found in every State, in every region, in every dialect, of America. And they seem to be speaking out again...loudly...in favor of individual freedom as so many were in the years before America's Civil War.