Jacob's Ladder: A Story of Virginia During the War

Winner of the Michael Shaara Award for Excellence in Civil War Fiction

A civil war saga that resonates with the bitter glory and human shame of the Confederacy.

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, Jesse—a Gatewood slave whose love for Maggie is unrequited—escapes 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

© 2025 W. W. Norton & Company (Ebook): 9780393347579

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Ebook: 25 april 2025