When the the Civil War was over, Jonathan and Susan Grenville moved their family back to Charleston, only to find that peace was easier to declare than to practice. The war that tore a nation apart might have ended in 1865, but the most important battles remained to be fought. The North struggled to resume business as usual, while the South faced economic disaster. Old state constitutions needed to be re-written before the United States would take their former enemies back into the Union. Old political alliances collapsed, and the party of Lincoln faced a decline into unparalleled graft and corruption. And over everyone hovered the question of what to do with the thousands of former slaves whose status as citizens remained undefined. The following ten years gave rise to some of the most important constitutional developments in the history of the United States. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments would change the face of a nation, but the advances came at a terrible cost. In many ways, the transition would take another hundred years to reach fruition. And in the meantime, generations of black men learned that the pathway to becoming an African-American was a dangerous one. As the reunited country struggled with the problems of Reconstruction, the Grenvilles found themselves seeking new economic opportunities to replace the old cotton culture. Jonathan and Susan inherited vast land holdings that threatened to bury them under a deluge of back taxes unless they could find a new way to turn the lands into new revenue sources. Other family members decided to work together to meet the ever-present need for food by creating their own grocery business. And two of the family's enterprising young people took on a challenge to capture, tame, and recreate an ancient breed of horses that had adapted themselves to living wild in the swamps of South Carolina's Lowcountry. At the same time, the Grenvilles were swept up into political rivalries and civil riots that churned their peaceful streets into battlegrounds. Family ties shattered as their maturing children searched for their own answers to the questions of how best to live their lives. One son took refuge in a separatist religious community, while another became an armed advocate of White Supremacy. Susan's black cousins fought for equality and became targets of those who hated blacks. A daughter was swept into a romance with a black man. Daily life became a constant battle marked by visits from the Ku Klux Klan, threats of violence, and accusations of murder. Follow the Grenvilles as they navigate the difficult years between 1867 and 1877.
About the Author: Carolyn Schriber hated history classes when she was growing up because they required little but memorization. Once she was so bored by the material that instead of answering an essay exam on the Revolutionary War, she filled in the space by writing several verses of "The Star-Spangled Banner." The professor gave her an A, which may have suggested that he was as tired of names and dates as she was. Or maybe he was just impressed that she knew more than the first verse. Eventually, however, she discovered a teacher who was an enthusiastic story-teller, and her love of history blossomed. While her husband served as a career Air Force officer, she taught high school Latin and English wherever they happened to be stationed. Then she went on to earn her doctoral degree in medieval history from the University of Colorado and spent the last seventeen years of her teaching career as the kind of college professor she had always wanted to have. After her retirement from teaching at Rhodes College, Schriber used her training and talents to examine a little-known event at the beginning of the Civil War. Taking her great-uncle's letters as a starting point, she analyzed the strategic errors that turned the Battle of Secessionville into a rout (A Scratch with the Rebels, 2007). Then she looked at the life of a nurse who was present at that battle (Beyond All Price, 2010). A missionary who arrived to care for abandoned slaves became the subject of another biography (The Road to Frogmore, 2011). Most recently she has been writing about civilians whose lives were forever disrupted by these events (Left by the Side of the Road, 2012, Damned Yankee, 2014, and Yankee Reconstructed, 2016). Three of her books have received medals from the Military Writers' Society of America, and in September 2015 that society named her "Author of the Year" in recognition of the quality of the entire body of her work.