Jacob's Cellar

"Jacob's Cellar" traces four generations of assimilation of a German-speaking immigrant family into American life. The tale begins with a retelling of a family story of the long-forgotten "War of the Regulation," a rural North Carolina precurser to the Revolutionary War culminating in 1771, in which farmers took up arms against corrupt colonial officials and were put down decisively in the so-called Battle of Alamance.The family leaves North Carolina as refugees from that conflict, moving west to lawless Tennessee and eventually further west to Missouri. There, their descendants are caught up in the Mexican War (1846-48) for which Missourians provided many of the American troops. A decade later those troops would be the core of the ill-fated Missouri State Guard that would be converted to the Missouri component of the Confederate Army and be decimated in the Civil War. The novel concerns the experience of ordinary rural Americans caught on the wrong side of history in most respects, participants in a journey leading to the disintegration of old cultural identities and assimilation into the larger society. Their individual triumphs and tragedies are tales of survival through these overwhelming events.