Jacob's Ladder - Donald McCaig

Jacob's Ladder is a Civil War epic, a love story that pits the indomitable longing of the human heart against circumstances of racism, slavery, and war. Duncan Gatewood, seventeen and heir to the Gatewood plantation, falls in love with Maggie, a mulatto slave, who conceives a son, Jacob. Maggie and Jacob are sold south, and Duncan is packed off to the Virginia Military Institute. As Duncan fights for Robert E. Lee, Jessea Gatewood slave whose love for Maggie is unrequitedescapes north and enlists in Lincoln's army, determined to confront his former masters, while Maggie finds herself living a life she never could have imagined as the wife of a blockade runner.
From the interlocked lives of masters and slaves, Donald McCaig conjures a passionate and richly textured story in the heart of America's greatest war. The destiny of these three compelling characters connect a Vicksburg brothel to a Richmond salon, the nightmare of a Confederate hospital to the lurid hell of battlefields at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville.
Winner of the John Eston Cook Award Winner of the Boyd Military Novel Award.

Donald McCaig (1940-2018) was the author of many historical novels including Jacob's Ladder, Rhett Butler's People, and Canaan.

A tale of courage, cowardice, death, life, growth, war, violence, redemption, and finally, love and compassion…A gentle compelling story about such an ungentle time.

Captures the details of wartime Virginia with stunning force.

This novel blots out the protection of historical distance. It is astonishingly immediate. Its research is magnificent but never intrudes. It becomes the story of war itself, how brutal it is, how courageous, how slowly and inexorably mad.
Mary Lee Settle

Boldly capricious, blessed with a host of vivid and memorable characters and a wealth of striking and credible events, Donald McCaig's powerful, compassionate story is deeply rooted in the real and living presence of Virginia before, during, and after the Civil War. Jacob's Ladder is historical fiction at its finest, and it places Donald McCaig in the pantheon of the best and brightest American novelists.

George Garrett

The finest novel about the Civil War ever written.

McCaig's prose is gorgeous…One of the best Civil War novels…Stunning.