A Country of Our Own

Details: By David Poyer

1861

Lt. Ker Custis Claiborne, formerly of the United States Navy, is no admirer of the institution of slavery. But he's also a Virginian. When the North decides to preserve an outworn Union by force, his course is clear. He "goes South," joining first the Virginia Navy, then the fledgling Confederate States Navy.

After fighting on the shores of the Potomac alongside the hastily mustered Army of Virginia, Ker runs the blockade out of New Orleans aboard a converted sidewheeler-turned-Confederate raider. He and his saturnine mentor, Captain Parker Trezevant, burn, sink, and destroy across the Caribbean, to undermine the Union's financial might and force a truce favorable to the Confederacy.

But when that first cruiser proves under-armed and short-legged, Ker joins Commander James Bullock in England to buy or build a ship of war capable of sweeping Union commerce from the seas. When a daring coup puts Ker in command of the fastest, most dangerous raider ever to range from Brazil to Boston -- the ex-opium clipper C.S.S. Maryland - he sets Yankee seamen a-tremble wherever the water's salt and seagulls scream. And he may even decide the outcome of the war.