Writer of Creative Nonfiction, Fiction, Poetry and Master Photographer
On October 19, 1864, a group of Confederates under the command of Lt. Bennett Young rolled into St. Albans, Vermont, from Canada. The plan was to rob the population of 4,000 town’s banks, cause chaos, burn buildings, and divert Union troops. Roughly 20 men, many of whom had escaped Union prisons and made their way…
I’ve seen the signs for years for the CSS Neuse when traveling on Highway 70 through Kinston. It’s one of those things my wife Kristi and I have always said “one day, we need to do that.” We finally did just before summer started, at the “new” museum for the ship and the area. It…
When he was 45 years old, Stephen Lee moved from Charleston, S.C. to Asheville, N.C. where he started a school for boys. He had attended the College of Charleston and West Point before starting his law practice with his father. He married his first cousin, Caroline Lee, in 1824 and they had fifteen children. Caroline…
A hundred and fifty eight years ago, the Union army was in New Bern and threatening to move west unchecked. The Confederate leadership showed little interest in making the defense of North Carolina a priority. Gen. John Foster of the Union army started making moves in November New Bern and the 47th North Carolina —…
It doesn’t seem that the role of women is given much consideration when people talk and write about the Civil War. There was a statue honoring the “women of the Confederacy” on the Capital Grounds in Raleigh. It’s been moved. On March 18, 1863, about 50 women resorted to violence in Salisbury, North Carolina —…
In August of 1880, former Confederate General Bryan Grimes was returning from a political convention in Washington County when he was killed by a hitman. The murder occurred in Bear Creek, just five miles from Grimes’ home, known as Grimesland. Grimes was a signer of North Carolina’s secession ordinance and joined the Confederate army shortly…
We had caught the drop on them . . . [but then] . . . the earth just seemed to open up and take that line Captain John H. Thorp (sometimes spelled Thorpe) of Rocky Mount wrote a summary of the actions of the 47th North Carolina Regiment. At one point, the outfit was running…
Confederate statues are coming down all over the country, and the one near me — in Rocky Mount, NC — starts getting moved today. The local newspaper said it will take five days and cost over $280,000. Ironically, the original cost to install the statue, in today’s dollars, was about $275,000. In my book Galvanized:…
I was fortunate enough to appear on Rocky Mount’s WHIG-TV recently to talk about Galvanized. Here’s the link:
“Michael Brantley’s Galvanized is a conscientious and sweeping hybrid narrative gathering together fragments of the author’s personal history—that of his great-great-grandfather’s life in nineteenth-century North Carolina—alongside elaborately researched accounts of the Civil War. When Brantley offers, ‘These were the stories that had become interesting to me, the stories about real people, regular people,’ he focuses our attention…