Echoes of Civil War

This is a biographical history written as a novel, specifically the colorful story of Colonel Daniel Robinson Alexander Campbell Hundley, born in 1832 in Madison County, Alabama, the fourth son of six siblings. His father, John Henderson Hundley married Melinda Robinson in Greenville County Virginia, and moved to Limestone County, Alabama in 1818 to raise their family. They built a thirteen room house near Mooresville.This is the story of a local Alabama boy who liked to write and...
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This is a biographical history written as a novel, specifically the colorful story of Colonel Daniel Robinson Alexander Campbell Hundley, born in 1832 in Madison County, Alabama, the fourth son of six siblings. His father, John Henderson Hundley married Melinda Robinson in Greenville County Virginia, and moved to Limestone County, Alabama in 1818 to raise their family. They built a thirteen room house near Mooresville.This is the story of a local Alabama boy who liked to write and wrote two books, but ended up in the Civil War. His writings are now in university libraries for historical research for authors and history scholars. Daniel was affectingly known as 'Colonel Dan'. He was born before his time, in this author's opinion; a well educated man who attended Bacon College, today the University of Kentucky, and received his law degree at Harvard. His graduation was the guarantee of his future mother-in-law's permission to marry his first cousin, Mary Ann Hundley, lovingly known as 'Nannie'. He worked for his uncle, Elisha Hundley, also his father-in-law in Chicago, while he attempted to write. Uncle Elisha and his partner, James H. Rees, bought a fort called Dearborn on an island near the Great Lakes in 1854, and developed a city known as Chicago. Daniel had a nice house on Lake View, and was very well known in the Chicago area and Kentucky. Within that time he completed his first book entitled, Social Relations in Our Southern States, published in 1860-his critique of Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin. In the same year the election of Lincoln obscured the sales of his book, and resulted in a dangerous situation for Southerners living or working in the North. James Rees warned Daniel to take his name off his luggage and leave Chicago; his reason, the vigilante committee were planning to rack him through the lake. Daniel therefore moved his family back to Alabama. The Fort Sumter event convinced Daniel that he had to make a decision. He liked working in Chicago, even supported the Union but he wasn't for secession or abolition, and he certainly would not fight against his own brothers. Instead, he recruited the 31st Regiment of Alabama and went into the war as a Colonel under General Hood, assigned to the Tennessee and Georgia campaigns. He was wounded, dragged into the house of a Southern lady who nursed him back to heath, after which he returned to his regiment. His regiment was overrun and he was captured, yet he escaped. Somehow the Yankees grew tired of Hundley's cleverness, and placed him in a Nashville prison. There he gained the friendship of a Yankee Captain who was on the train that took him to Johnson Island prison for officers on the Canadian border. While in this dingy dungeon he wrote a book entitled, Prison Echoes. Bored and tired of rat-tail soup, he escaped again, one of a handful who had ever escaped from this island surround by a frozen lake. But while resting after a warm meal he was recaptured and served out the war in Johnson Island prison. His manuscript of Prison Echoes was taken as contraband, but was sent to him by someone who discovered it after the war. As an eyewitness account through the eyes of Col. Daniel Robinson Hundley, the situation that existed in this infamous war is unvarnished. Not a tale of two cities, but an accurate account of why war is hell! This novel follows Daniel's diary, which he wrote on Almanac paper while in prison. It contains daily accounts of prison news and secret information coming through the grapevine. In one notation Daniel records that some men from Chicago attempted to buy Mt. Vernon from Washington's nephew.