Americans know about the battles of the Civil War: Gettysburg, Bull Run, Antietam. We know about the politics: Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, John Marshall, the Quakers. We know about the Generals: Benjamin Butler, Ulysses Grant, Robert E. Lee. We know what the historians have told us about the events of that time. What we don’t know about, and have refused to really explore, is the impact slavery had on all the people of this country, whatever their pigmentation.Sure, we know what Birth Of A Nation, Gone With The Wind, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Huckleberry Finn tell us, and those were legitimate points of view. But slavery was much more dynamic, revealing the underbelly of the nation’s basic creed of life, liberty and the pursuit of justice, and its notion that all men are created equal under God. These short stories explore the essence of that life, the emotions and the circumstances–good and bad and indifferent. They allow the reader to explore the impact of American slavery on the lives of those, no matter their station in life, who had to live with what American said about itself and what it actually was. The struggle lives on!