afterword

this book is about the gritty, devastating effects of war — in this case, the often- dissected

american civil war—but isn’t about officers, battle statistics, or strategies. it’s about young

confederate soldiers without rank, infantrymen on foot for as many as a thousand miles a year

carrying out war’s grimmest chores, sometimes for a cause they didn’t support. the story places

its protagonist, tom smiley, on the southern side because that’s where conditions were

harshest, the cause hardest to justify, and the site where most of the killing happened.

i was barely an adult during the vietnam war, when many american soldiers were injured

and killed for a cause with little connection to their lives. i wondered if the same was true for

confederate soldiers during the civil war. i suspect most of the southern combatants were

racists, but only one in four families in the south owned enslaved people and had anything to

lose if the institution was abolished.

wars are often instigated by a proportionately small number of people whose wealth makes

them politically and socially powerful, some of whom become military officers. most white

southern wealth at that time was related either directly or indirectly to owning and selling black

humans. this white group was hell-bent on retaining a barbaric institution to enrich themselves

and avoid daily labor. and ordinary citizens were the majority of those who paid the terrible

price of death, injury, ptsd, and destruction of property. men like tom quickly became cogs in

a vast military machine. the confederacy established a draft in april 1862, ten months after the

first battle, and consequences of avoiding enlistment or deserting were beatings, imprisonment,

or death. just as in the south, many folks in the north didn’t believe in equality, but their black

and white leaders correctly convinced them slavery must be abolished.

slavery began in the colony of virginia, and by the time of the civil war, the state rivaled

south carolina and louisiana for sales of enslaved people. auctions were held in richmond and

in smaller towns along primary transportation routes leading into the deep south where larger,

even more brutal cotton and sugar plantations existed. by the time of the war, selling humans

south into killing labor was more lucrative than any crop a virginia landowner could raise.

there was a steady current of enslaved people through virginia to plantations in louisiana and

mississippi.

in augusta county in southwestern virginia, the setting of this book, farmers weren’t

necessarily more humane than those in the rest of the state, but their crops of wheat and rye

required much less field work. farms were smaller than those growing tobacco and cotton, and

they most often required only family members and hired hands as laborers. one in five augusta

families owned other people, but a third of those owned no more than one person. often,

enslaved people were rented out to wait on hotel and tavern tables, tend stables and animals,

erect telegraph poles, work in breweries, lay rail lines, and provide domestic labor. across the

south on the eve of the civil war, when an annual salary for an upper middle-class white man

might be $500, a healthy, young, enslaved black man sold for as much as $1,500. today, that

individual person’s purchase price would be approximately $100,000 or more. by the time of

emancipation in 1863, the combined value of all the south’s slaves, adjusted to today’s prices

using the relative share of gdp, was close to thirteen trillion dollars and, even as early as 1805,

never fell below six trillion dollars. this is what confederate leaders knew, and why they

wanted to secede. they wanted to protect their wealth, built on the backs of enslaved people,

even if it meant bloodshed.

virginia was a border state during the war, and the southwestern region was strongly

populated by scotch-irish people who had migrated from pennsylvania. many of them had

strong connections with family members and friends in the north and shared anti-slavery views.

again, this isn’t to say they weren’t racist. the reasons men from this region volunteered and

then stayed as enlistees in the early part of the civil war differed across social classes. after the

draft was created, wealthy young men hired substitutes. upper- class white people told

themselves and others that the reason for fighting was to preserve states’ rights, disguising the

fact that less fortunate people were dying to defend a privileged way of life made possible by

enslaving blacks. as northern troops marched into the south, purpose for the ordinary,

powerless confederate soldier had to become survival and defense of a homeland. i asked

myself while researching material for this book why those opposing slavery didn’t leave the

south as war was brewing. an admirable few had that courage, including presbyterian minister

dr. george junkin, the real person reverend mcintyre is based on, but most couldn’t give up

the security of family, friends, and land from which they earned a living. and some even

believed that enslaving black people was encouraged by the bible.

tom smiley, civil war veteran and ghost narrator of the last of what i am, is tormented by

war memories and is trapped by them in an increasingly personal hell. but he’s also a stand-in

for this nation, one unsettled by a history rife with injustices and motives many of us still can’t

face, not even generations later. until we embrace that history and its long shadows, the nation

won’t be able to fully rectify those injustices and heal. this novel is a cautionary tale about what

happens when a country is divided against itself.