‘Undaunted Heart: The True Story of a Southern Belle and a Yankee General’ author at Freeport Library June 15
Posted By Brandon Reid On June 15, 2010 @ 10:46 am In Happening Now | No Comments
From press release
FREEPORT, Ill.—What are the complications that can ensue when a man and a woman, both on different sides of a war that has just ended, decide to marry? Noted author Suzy Barile will provide some answers at 7 p.m., tonight (Tuesday, June 15), at the Freeport Public Library when she discusses her book, Undaunted Heart: The True Story of a Southern Belle and a Yankee General. The “author chat” is open to the public, free of charge.
When a brigade of General Sherman’s victorious army marched into Chapel Hill the day after Easter 1865, the Civil War had just ended and President Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated. Citizens of the picturesque North Carolina college town had endured years of hardship and sacrifice, and now the Union army was patrolling its streets. One of Sherman’s young generals paid a visit to the stately home of David Swain, president of the University of North Carolina and a former governor of the state, to inform him the town was now under Union occupation.
Against this unlikely backdrop began a passionate and controversial love story still vivid in town lore. When President Swain’s daughter Ella met the Union general, life for these two young people who had spent the war on opposite sides was forever altered.
General Smith Atkins of Freeport abhorred slavery and greatly admired Abraham Lincoln. Spirited young Ella Swain had been raised in a slave-owning family and had spent the war years gathering supplies to send to Confederate soldiers.
But, as a close friend of the Swains wrote, when Atkins met Ella, the two “‘changed eyes’ at first sight and a wooing followed.”
The reaction of the Swains and fellow North Carolinians to this North-South love affair was swift and often unforgiving.
In Undaunted Heart, author Suzy Barile, a great-great-granddaughter of Ella Swain and Smith Atkins, tells their story, separating facts from the elaborate embellishments the famous courtship and marriage have taken on over the generations. Interwoven throughout Undaunted Heart are excerpts from Ella’s never-before-published letters to her parents that reveal a loving marriage that transcended differences and scandal. Some of the research that Suzy Barile did for the book was done at the Stephenson County Historical Society.
Copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event, and Barile has agreed to autograph any and all copies brought or bought.
Article printed from The Rock River Times: http://rockrivertimes.com
URL to article: http://rockrivertimes.com/2010/06/15/%e2%80%98undaunted-heart-the-true-story-of-a-southern-belle-and-a-yankee-general%e2%80%99-author-at-freeport-library-june-15/
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