Some Wore Blue & Some Wore Gray

By Heather Graham

With the 150th Anniversary of the Battle at Gettysburg and the Siege of Vicksburg, New York Times Best Selling Author, Heather Graham, is revisiting one of her favorite time periods - The American Civil War. This time, however, she has compiled biographies of some of her favorite real-life characters of the period. We hope you'll enjoy her gift to you in SOME WORE BLUE & SOME WORE GRAY. And feel free to comment in the review section if there are people you would be interested in reading about from the Civil War. Ms. Graham sees this as a living, growing document and is certain to add to it as time goes by. Enjoy!
And then when you want to see where all this love of history took her, check out her three Bantam novels ONE WORE BLUE, ONE WORE GRAY, and AND ONE RODE WEST.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Heather Graham
• Release date: Jul 3, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301919024

Heather Graham

New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Heather Graham has written more than a hundred novels. She's a winner of the RWA's Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Thriller Writers' Silver Bullet. She is an active member of International Thriller Writers and Mystery Writers of America. For more information, check out her websites: TheOriginalHeatherGraham.com, eHeatherGraham.com, and HeatherGraham.tv. You can also find Heather on Facebook.

Book preview

Some Wore Blue & Some Wore Gray

Heather Graham

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013 Heather Graham

The Why of This Little Booklet

I have always loved New Orleans. From the first time I went with my dad when I was a child, I was in love with the architecture, the music, the art—and the cemeteries. I’ve used the city as the setting for many books.

To that end, in 2005 I was in the city with my children and my nephew filming a book trailer in Lafayette Cemetery in the Garden District one weekend. It was fun and wonderful—they were all dressed up as ghosts from different eras in the city’s history for a book about a ghost tour guide called Ghost Walk. We went home, and that same week Katrina came and struck Miami. We watched as it moved across the Gulf with growing dread. At a 1 status the storm ripped up the city of Miami. Watching it strengthen, we feared for our fellows in the Florida Panhandle and the rest of the Gulf States.

Katrina herself didn’t destroy the city—those in Biloxi and other cities were battered more fiercely. But when the levees broke and the city of New Orleans began to flood, my family feared that we might have taken some of our last pictures of a place so unique in history, a place unlike any other place in our country.

The damage was, of course, devastating. The human life lost was more than tragic.

But Americans who love their homes will always pick up the pieces.

To that end, I returned to the city as quickly as possible, and it was seeing friends there that got me going on Writers for New Orleans. At the time of this visit, I had a child living with me who—with hundreds of others—had been sent out of Louisiana in order to be able to continue school. But what I heard from her parents, along with my carriage-driving and tourist-working friends was that while they were incredibly grateful to the American people, who were helping (not so much city, parish, state or federal government, but the American people), what they needed to do was work. They needed people to come back to the city. So, the year of the storms—Katrina, Rita, and Wilma—Writers for New Orleans was born. What kind of writer? Ahhhh—any! Maybe people didn’t want to write—but perhaps they read. Perhaps they were just being dragged along. To that end, we planned a conference that would incorporate writers, readers—and those who just wanted to see New Orleans. So that meant we had parties.

A few years ago, at one of my Writers for New Orleans conference, my friends—writers F. Paul Wilson, Kathy Love, and Erin McCarthy—hosted a party for Writers on Bourbon Street. We try to theme each year and our theme that year was the Civil War. (Or the War of Northern Aggression; yes, I’m still alive as I write this and that’s how it was taught to me in school in Florida!) Our people love costumes and so we had a costume party and a contest called Know your Civil War Characters. We had quite a few in our group specifically dressed as people from Civil War times. For example, we dressed up Paul—who is from New Jersey—as Robert E. Lee. My son Jason, from Florida, was dressed up as Grant. I was Varina Davis . . . son Shayne was Custer while son Derek was the great Southern cavalryman Jeb Stuart. Everyone was given a booklet to read and allowed to ask questions of those we had costumed specially as characters. They then made their guesses and prizes were given out.

This year is the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg and the Siege of Vicksburg. Vicksburg surrendered on July 3rd. Gettysburg ended on the 4th. Both were pivotal moments, and, perhaps, the fact that both occurred on such a date meant something since the outcome of the war had everything to do with the breaking or making of our great nation.

Years ago, I wrote three books in something called the Cameron Series—One Wore Blue, One Wore Gray, and And One Rode West. (The first books were Sweet Savage Eden, A Pirate’s Pleasure, and Love Not a Rebel—the settling of the country, the age of pirates, and the American Revolution.)

These three books were near and dear to my heart. For years my family had traveled up and down the east coast to see relatives in the North. With five children, we often wound up going to museums and cemeteries and shrines, learning about the great divide that had nearly torn us apart as a country. Witnessing a reenactment and learning about real families torn asunder, I wanted to write fiction that explained everyone’s way of thinking—and to show the good, the bad, and the ugly of those who lived and died in such traumatic times.

This year, Bantam is rereleasing Blue, Gray, and West. They were written long ago, and yet they remain, to me, close and important and a very real part of my own life.

This list of important players in the war is far from complete—and also contains some of my personal feelings. It should grow and will grow.

But those in these pages were different, with different goals and passions and beliefs. Think of today, as we are so often torn apart. We are still mostly, truly good people—with different thoughts and opinions on how things should be done, and often equally passionate with those thoughts and opinions.

North and South—good men fought and good men died. Please share your opinions with me—tell me if you think I’m wrong and tell me who you believe should be added. This will continue as a free work in progress!

P.S.—These days, I’m still into history, just now in the form of ghosts. Contemporary stories—but filled with history. If you like, please check out my Krewe of Hunter series and Cafferty and Quinn books. All have segments of the past. I love history—but

Reviews for Some Wore Blue & Some Wore Gray

[Melissa Ossinsky · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book took these people from history and made them as real me as people I know.Great book!