Alemeth

Alemeth Byers, son of a cotton planter, is determined to please his father, stand up to his friends and resist his meddlesome stepmother, but he finds himself surrounded by people who want him to do what they think best. He longs for the day he’ll be able to do what he wants. But as he grows older, the pressure to please

others mounts: Go to Sunday School? Take over the Plantation? Go to college? Entering the newspaper business, he's exposed to conflicting deas about fact, fiction and truth. But the biggest problem, everyone agrees, is that the government in Washington has gone out of control: it threatens to deprive people of what they’ve worked their whole lives for and, ultimately, to subjugate the South. Where are Alemeth’s loyalties? If civil war breaks out, will he pursue his own desires, or do what his sense of duty to his family demands?

Interwoven with the early history of Ole Miss, of Oxford, Mississippi, of its newspapers, and of America's acceptance of human bondage, Alemeth, in the end, is about slavery and independence in all their forms. The book incorporates actual period newspaper articles and letters written home during the civil war. Illustrations, maps, and bibliography.