The Jackal's Mistress

Set in September and October of 1864, The Jackal’s Mistress takes place three years and approximately four months after Confederate troops fired on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor (April 12, 1861), the event to which many point as the beginning of the Civil War. Few expected the war to last a year; both sides envisioned a quick victory for themselves. In fact, Lee’s surrender came four long years later, on April 9, 1865, and it took another 16 months for Confederate forces to surrender and President Andrew Jackson to declare an official end to the conflict.

Years’ worth of bloody battles and skirmishes greatly weakened both the physical size of armies and soldiers’ morale on both sides. However, the Union victory at the Battle of Gettysburg (July 1-3, 1863) marked the beginning of a slow turn in the North’s favor, followed by consequential events like Union General Grant’s refusal to retreat at the Battle of the Wilderness (May 5-7, 1864) and his subsequent choice to press on to Richmond. The retreat of Confederate forces from Atlanta (September 1, 1864) followed, and Union General Sherman’s “march to the sea” started on November 15, 1864.

The novel’s events come shortly after Union General Grant’s order to General Philip H. Sheridan, in the late summer of 1864, to defeat Confederate General Jubal Early’s army in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Sheridan also contended with a Confederate partisan leader mentioned several times in the novel, John Mosby, and his band of rangers; this group conducted raids on Union garrisons and was not a part of the Confederate Army and therefore not obligated to follow their rules (“John Singleton Mosby.” National Park Service). Besides defeating Early and Mosby, Sheridan was intent on also wrecking the harvest; Confederate troops and the city of Richmond counted on the valley’s farmlands to supply their wheat, the origins of its nickname of “breadbasket of the Confederacy” (104).

After weeks of fighting, a skirmish on September 13 at Gilbert’s Ford on the Opequan River resulted in terrible injuries for a Union officer, Lieutenant Henry E. Bedell. Later abandoned by his army due to his injuries, Bedell was rescued by a young woman, Mrs. Bettie Van Metre, the wife of a miller fighting for the Confederacy. These historical figures inspired the premise of The Jackal’s Mistress (though the novel’s romance, suspense, and conflict with Lieutenant Morgan are entirely fictionalized). Weeks after the skirmish in which Bedell was wounded, Early’s army retreated, and Sheridan began “The Burning,” in which his men burned many farm buildings and mills in the Shenandoah Valley (“Philip Sheridan’s 1864 Valley Campaign.” Shenandoah Valley Battlefields National Historic District). It is ironic that, in the novel, protagonist Libby, a Southerner, sees her farm and mill burned not by Sheridan’s troops but by the Confederate cavalry in retaliation for her helping a Union officer.

The Jackal’s Mistress joins a long list of fictional works that have explored the Civil War. Other novels inspired by the historical events of or relating to the Civil War include The Red Badge of Courage (1895) by Stephen Crane, which takes place in rural parts of Virginia; The Killer Angels (1974)  by Michael Shaara, a story of the Battle of Gettysburg; The Good Lord Bird (2013), by James McBride, regarding abolitionist John Brown’s life; and The March (1974) by E. L. Doctorow, a fictionalized account of Sherman’s “march to the sea” after the Battle of Atlanta.