Books: Rebel Romance

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Two men broke up this amiable relationship: New England-born Edward Colburne, and Virginia-born Lieutenant-Colonel Carter, a dark-haired, hard-drinking, segar-smoking veteran of many wars and love affairs, a widower of nearly 40 who had stayed with the Union despite mysterious intrigues with Southern filibusters before the war. Intelligent, discerning, timid, young Colburne let the Colonel walk off with Lillie. She was almost annoyed about it. Colburne, she thought, was "very pleasant, lively and good; but—and here she ceased to reason—she felt that he was not magnetic." The Colonel certainly was. When all four turned up in New Orleans after the Yankees captured the city, Colonel Carter found his playful love affair with Lillie growing serious, married her despite his need for money, the political favoritism that blocked his promotion, her father's fear of him, her sophisticated New Orleans aunt's frank advances toward him. As sardonic a figure as Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind, but far more plausible, Colonel Carter became a drinker without believing he drank, sold government supplies without believing he was dishonest, and—before Lillie's baby was born—drifted into a love affair with Lillie's young aunt without losing his belief that he was an honorable Virginia gentleman. Meanwhile, he was a hero—whipping his troops into superb order, disciplining them ruthlessly, winning their admiration, leading them into carnage at Port Hudson and damning the cowardly political generals who got sick on the eve of battles. But when Lillie discovered his deception, the only good impulse in his "emphatic and volcanic nature" disappeared. Plodding Captain Colburne saved the family in a raid, avoided in embarrassment the wiles of Lillie's aunt, finally won Lillie—in about the sense that the North won the South.

The Author. Born in Humphreysville (now Seymour), Conn, in 1826, John William De Forest dropped out of school at 13 after his father's death, wrote an authoritative history of Connecticut Indians at 25, spent two years in the Near East and Europe (where he translated Hawthorne into Italian) before he was 30, wrote two travel books and two reasonably successful novels. In 1856 he married Harriet Silliman Shepard and for the next few years divided his time between New Haven and Charleston, S. C. When Sumter was fired on he escaped from Charleston on the last ship going north, recruited a Connecticut company, captained it, served under Weitzel and Banks in Louisiana, under Sheridan in Virginia, was a major when the war ended. He was in charge of the Freedmen's Bureau at Greenville, S. C., when Miss Ravenel's Conversion was published. His service ended in 1868 and he spent the rest of his life in New Haven turning out bitter novels satirizing the Gilded Age.