Long before they defended Fort Sanders’s Northwest Bastion, the Seventy-Ninth New York Cameron Highlanders was decimated on the slope of Henry Hill at First Manassas, where their first regimental colonel, James Cameron, was killed by a bullet in his chest. Cameron’s brother, Simon, was then President Lincoln’s secretary of war.

“We came together again and moved forward, but we were driven back again, with many fallen, dead and wounded, and a good many others were captured,” my fictional Private Burton Laing recalls First Manassas in the novel. “We retired down the hill again, and this time we saw as we passed by him that our own good Colonel Cameron was mortally wounded.”