Seven Months a Prisoner: A Yankee Lieutenant in Rebeldom (Expanded, Annotated)

By John Vestal Hadley

Book Overview

His horse was shot out from under him. Thrown into a tree and left for dead on the hellish battlefield of the Wilderness, young Union lieutenant John Vestal Hadley was written off by his comrades as mortally wounded and lost.

But Hadley woke up-on the wrong side of the lines.

Captured with his friend Homer Chisman and dragged into Confederate hands, Hadley began a harrowing journey through prison camps, illness, hunger, and constant danger. This is his own first-person account of what came next: daring escapes, desperate flights through hostile countryside, recapture and renewed resolve, and the razor-thin choices that meant life or death in the closing year of the Civil War.

Again and again, Hadley and Chisman owed their lives to the courage of ordinary southerners-especially enslaved and free African Americans-who risked brutal punishment, even death, to hide them, guide them by night, and point the way back to Union lines. One man, speaking in a low voice and glancing over his shoulder, tells them plainly that his master is "very hard" and that "Massa would cut my head off, sho'," if he were ever caught helping "the Yankees."

Seven Months a Prisoner is not fiction. It is a vivid, boots-on-the-ground memoir of capture, survival, and escape, told by a young officer who saw the inside of Confederate prisons and the underside of the wartime South-and somehow made it home to tell the tale.

Perfect for readers who enjoy: True Civil War escape and POW narrativesGritty, firsthand soldier accounts rather than romanticized historiesStories of quiet bravery from the people who risked everything to help fugitives reach freedomStep into Hadley's world and march with him, night after night, as he gambles everything on one goal: getting back to the Union lines alive.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1519045212
• ISBN13: 9781519045218
• Release Date: November 2016
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 150 Pages
• Weight: 0.46 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.0" x 9.0"