Wild Southern Scenes, A Tale of Disunion! and Border War!

Imagine if someone wrote a novel about the American Civil War before it ever happened—before the election of the anti-slavery Republican Party’s first president, Abraham Lincoln; before the secession of the Southern states; before the outbreak of hostilities.  While a work of fiction can never carry the weight of the carefully researched and documented work of professional historians, intangibles like moods, fears, prejudices, and personal entanglements can arguably be better expressed by the novelist, who is not bound by the strictures of documentation and the disputation of dry facts.  What was on people’s minds as they watched the schism between slave and non-slave states widen, as the rhetoric grew more and more bitter, and as the notion of secession gradually entered the national debate as a serious option?  Those are questions answered for the reader by Wild Southern Scenes, A Tale of Disunion! and Border War! which was published originally in 1859, a full year before South Carolina began the secession of the Southern states into the Confederacy.  This novel offers a fascinating glimpse into what people were thinking and imagining as one of the greatest and most tragic wars in human history inexorably approached.  One might call it an alternative history of the Civil War—a history from a different dimension—The Man in the High Castle a century earlier.

Preparing old books for digital publication is a labor of love at Travelyn Publishing.  We hold our digital versions of public domain books up against any others with no fear of the comparison.  Our conversion work is meticulous, utilizing a process designed to eliminate errors, maximize reader enjoyment, and recreate as much as possible the atmosphere of the original book even as we are adding the navigation and formatting necessary for a good digital book.  While remaining faithful to a writer’s original words, and the spellings and usages of his era, we are not above correcting obvious mistakes.  If the printer became distracted after placing an ‘a’ at the end of a line and then placed another ‘a’ at the beginning of the next line (they used to do this stuff by hand you know!), what sort of mindless robots would allow that careless error to be preserved for all eternity in the digital version, too?  Not us.  That’s why we have the audacity to claim that our re-publications are often better than the originals.