Synopsis
Georgia burns.
Sherman’s Yankees are closing in.
Will the women of LaGrange run or fight?
Based on the true story of the celebrated Nancy Hart Rifles, The Cotillion Brigade is a sweeping epic of the Civil War’s ravages on family and love, the resilient bonds of sisterhood amid the devastation, and the miracle of reconciliation between bitter enemies.
“Gone With The Wind meets A League Of Their Own.”– John Jeter, The Plunder Room
1856. Sixteen-year-old Nannie Colquitt Hill makes her debut in the antebellum society of the Chattahoochee River plantations. A thousand miles to the north, a Wisconsin farm boy, Hugh LaGrange, joins an Abolitionist crusade to ban slavery in Bleeding Kansas.
Five years later, secession and total war against the homefronts of Dixie hurl them toward a confrontation unrivaled in American history.
Nannie defies the traditions of Southern gentility by forming a women’s militia and drilling it four long years to prepare for battle. With their men dead, wounded, or retreating with the Confederate armies, only Captain Nannie and her Fighting Nancies stand between their beloved homes and the Yankee torches.
Hardened into a slashing Union cavalry colonel, Hugh duels Rebel generals Joseph Wheeler and Nathan Bedford Forrest across Tennessee and Alabama. As the war churns to a bloody climax, he is ordered to drive a burning stake deep into the heart of the Confederacy.
Yet one Georgia town—which by mocking coincidence bears Hugh’s last name—stands defiant in his path.
Read the remarkable story of the Southern women who formed America’s most famous female militia and the Union officer whose life they changed forever.
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Excerpt
Nancy gathered the crinoline folds of her hooped white gown and slipped unnoticed through the rear door to the bedroom’s third-story veranda. She kicked off her slippers and climbed the narrow stairs that led to the banistered promenade crowning the Bellevue mansion, a white Greek Revival temple overlooking the plantations of LaGrange. As she hid behind the corner, she watched the guests arriving through the iron-cast gates on Broad Street. Her gasp of delight nearly gave her away.
Under the cloudless night sky, flickering oil lamps lit the way for the caravan of carriages rolling in on the tree-lined lane from town and the neighboring plantations. Every movement from miles around appeared choreographed as if in a dream; the conveyances pulled up to the entrance, and the doorman bowed and placed a footstool to assist the ladies. She squinted to catch her first glimpse of the latest fashions from New Orleans and Atlanta. The necklines were lower this year. She reached for the underwire girding her petticoats and pulled the apparatus down an inch to show more décolletage. On the portico, the young men gathered in their cravats and tails and vied to escort the ladies into the grand hall, now cleared of furniture to serve as the ballroom.
And they were all coming to see her.
About the Author
A graduate of Indiana University School of Law and Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Glen Craney practiced trial law before joining the Washington, D.C. press corps to write about national politics and the Iran-contra trial for Congressional Quarterly magazine. In 1996, the Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts and Sciences awarded him the Nicholl Fellowship prize for best new screenwriting. His debut historical novel, The Fire and the Light, was named Best New Fiction by the National Indie Excellence Awards. He is a three-time Finalist/Honorable Mention winner of Foreword Magazine’s Book-of-the-Year and a Chaucer Award winner for Historical Fiction. His books have taken readers to Occitania during the Albigensian Crusade, the Scotland of Robert Bruce, Portugal during the Age of Discovery, the trenches of France during World War I, the battlefields of the Civil War, and the American Hoovervilles of the Great Depression. He lives in Malibu, California.
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