Jon G Stephenson

Drums of Doom Jon G Stephenson

On May 16, 1863, a battle was fought near Edwards Station, Mississippi. The Southerners would call this clash the Battle of Baker's Creek. The Federals named it the Battle of Champion Hill. It may, in fact, have had far more to do with the demise of the Confederacy than did the three days of Gettysburg. A contemporary historian, the Compte de Paris, in his HISTORY OF THE CIVIL WAR IN AMERICA, wrote that the Battle of Champion Hill was "the most complete defeat the Confederates [had] sustained since the commencement of the Civil War."With the defeat of the Southern army that day on Champion Hill, the last significant barrier to Grant's conquest of the vital Confederate river bastion at Vicksburg had been removed. The river city's fall seven weeks later guaranteed Ulysses S. Grant a place in the history books, and it set the tone for the final years of the Civil War. This is an historical fiction. By that, I mean that I've taken the facts of history, as gleaned from official after-action reports contained in the "The War of the Rebellion - A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies," and from several excellent histories and a collection of the diaries and letters of partipants in this battle, and I've used those accounts as a foundation upon which to build a fictionalized account of what is perhaps one of the most important battles of the American Civil War