A Good Inheritance

<p>Growing up in a small South Carolina town in the early 1960s sixteen-year-old Wade James is a regular teenager. An accident leaves him in the hospital for two months however and Wade needs something to pass the time. He turns to the Civil War diary of his great-grandfather Lofton James-and finds himself stepping back in time.</p><p>In the summer of 1862 sixteen-year-old Lofton enlists in the Confederate Army; subsequently he fights bloody battles at Corinth and later at Vicksburg Mississippi. Here he is captured and paroled and then serves in northern Georgia and northern Virginia. An excellent marksman he is pressed into duty as a sharpshooter. In that capacity he commits a life-altering act: he kills US Major-General John Sedgwick at the Battle of Spotsylvania in May of 1864. The revulsion Lofton feels over what he considers a dishonorable act causes him to desert.</p><p>Having recovered from his injury Wade keeps reading the diary; the more he reads the bigger impression the journal makes on him. In 1962 the civil rights movement is gaining momentum and Wade realizes that he must make a difficult decision to do the right thing. With his great-grandfather's words to bolster him Wade makes a moral choice that will profoundly affect him for the rest of his life.</p>