Kristina

Jerome V. Lofgren

Description

A fast-paced Civil War thriller of a woman who fought as a man.
Kristina, A Civil War Woman is a Historical novel about the women of the south during in the Civil War. The heroine is Kristina Augustsson who fought in the Southern Army by disguising herself as a man.

Kristina had emigrated from Sweden to Charleston, South Carolina in August 1860. Because she was big and unattractive, Kristina's disguise as a man gained her free passage as an indentured harness maker. Her nickname was "Pig-Face."

Shortly after landing in Charleston, Kristina was caught up in the War between the States. She fought beside her friend and fellow immigrant, Kurt Petersson and eventually was given the command of the Quaker Artillery Battery of the Army of North Virginia.

Historical records show that she was killed on May 2, 1863, in the battle of Chancellorsville.

When General Stonewall Jackson came upon Kristina dying beside her fallen friend, he said, "I've never seen a braver man." Her dying protest, "I'm a woman," went unheeded. The General thought the dying soldier was delirious. He could not see that his gallant warrior was a woman who wanted to be loved, have a home and children like any woman of her day.

Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind showed us the aristocratic Southern women. Kristina,shows us the lower class Southern women who fought the war with whatever resources available to them.

Sujets

• Histoire
• Women
• Swedish
• Woman
• Slavery
• The Women
• Civil War
• History
• Charleston
• Immigration

Informations

• Publié par: iUniverse
• Date de parution: 09 décembre 2001
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781469759005
• Langue: English

Extrait

K RISTINA
A Civil War Woman
Jerome V. Lofgren
 
 
 
 
Writers Club Press San Jose New York Lincoln Shanghai
 
Kristina A Civil War Woman
 
All Rights Reserved © 2001 by JVL Alaska, Inc.
 
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the publisher.
 
Writers Club Press an imprint of iUniverse, Inc.
 
For information address:
iUniverse, Inc.
5220 S. 16th St., Suite 200
Lincoln, NE 68512
www.iuniverse.com
 
ISBN: 0-595-20907-6
ISBN: 978-1-4697-5900-5 (ebook)
 
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
Dedication  
Introduction  
CHAPTER ONE  
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2  
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4  
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CHAPTER TWO  
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CHAPTER THREE  
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CHAPTER FOUR  
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CHAPTER FIVE  
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CHAPTER SIX  
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CHAPTER SEVEN  
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CHAPTER EIGHT  
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CHAPTER NINE  
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CHAPTER TEN  
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CHAPTER ELEVEN  
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CHAPTER TWELVE  
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Dedication  
Kristina’s struggles were inspired by my great grandparents and my grandparents whose journels and letters I drew upon either in part or whole. While Kristina was caught up into the Southern Army my great grandfather Andrew Anderson stepped off the boat at Chicago and soon found himself fighting on the Union side. This story is dedicated of all those who came to a new land seeking a better life and became involved in a fight not of their making of which they had no understanding. There were none braver.
 
Introduction  
Kristina Augustsson has been dead for these past one hundred and thirty-five years. Her body was laid out in a long, unmarked grave that contained hundreds of others who also died that day. The place where she was buried has been overgrown with grass and all traces of her grave are gone. Today strangers wander over the rolling hills near Chancellorville, Virginia, unaware of Kristina’s final resting-place below their feet. While her body has long since returned to the soil of her adopted land, the story of how she came to be at the place of her death and her adventurous life that lead up to it continues to inspire all the unattractive girls and women of this world.
 
CHAPTER ONE  
EYES
Tyrants and the oppressed, Deceivers and the deceived, And lovers too, with eyes do engage. Searching eyes, Inviting eyes, Shifting eyes, Eyes that reveal the inner soul, the portals through which it flees. Dead eyes behold the truth that living eyes cannot see. If they can’t see a woman then a man shall I be.
—Kristina, Spring 1859, Setter, Sweden
1  
Back to that time long ago when Kristina was seventeen and spring was coming on, her favorite place to go to get away and think her thoughts was the grove of birch trees that grew on the knoll above the farm where she lived with her mother and father. From this knoll, she could see the surrounding hills of Setter coming to life with the bright green of new buds.
In the best of times, life for a tenant farmer in Sweden during the mid-19th century was hard but this previous winter the snows had not come and the ground lay brown and dusty for lack of moisture just when spring planting was about to begin. Kristina was sensitive to the hard life she and her parents were forced to live. It was tough, physical work with little return. What little return there was would be taken by the landlord. But Kristina had her eyes set on greater things. Sitting on her favorite rock, she carefully unfolded the flyer that had been jammed into her hands by a stranger when she was in town for Sunday services at the State Lutheran Church.
The flyer announced that free prairie land waited for any who would come and take it. The soil was so rich and black that a farmer could easily push a stick the length of his elbow into the rich black soil. There were no trees to clear away, no rocks to pick. The land was just waiting for some farmer to come and work the soil. In a few months, the wheat and corn would jump out of the ground to yield hundreds of bushels per hectare. All the land was free to those who would cross the great ocean to the America Land.
Kristina’s imagination spun on to furnished her room in the new house that they would build in the prairie land. Her bed would have a duck down mattress and comforters that only the rich landlords had. She would never again be cold in the winter.
Her room would be on the second floor looking out over rolling hills that lifted up from a pond filled with trout. Wild ducks and geese would swoop in at evening time to feed. Flowerbeds would surround the house so that their fragrances would softly loft in through her open window to awaken her senses each morning.
A big vegetable garden would yield potatoes, carrots, onions, squash and all sorts of other wonderful vegetables. And on the hill behind the house, they would have an orchard of apple, cherry, and even plum trees.
Of course, there would be some milk cows and beef cattle, sheep and chickens, and geese, and a few pigs.
She could hardly contain her anticipation that her dream might come true.
And children! Her dreams always included a lot of children, boys and girls. She loved children. She knew that if she were to have children she would have to find a husband. Then they could go to the America Land and her life would be complete.
Her imagination had no bounds when it came to her fantasy life on the farm in the America land.
When she looked at her father, she saw a man old before his time with hard, callused hands with big swollen knuckles. His fingers were growing stiff from the hard work. Her mother, once a beautiful young girl, now had a face weathered and wrinkled and she was growing more ashen with the onset of the lung sickness sweeping through the farms of Setter that winter. Even her father had that look about him, the look of a dying man.
Kristina dreamt of taking her parents aboard the Valkyrie. It was a schooner that the flyer said would depart Stockholm the first of July bound for America. They would go to the prairie land and start a new life.
“We can’t go,” said her father sadly, when Kristina showed him the flyer. “We’re bound to this farm for two more years.”
Her father’s cough had been growing harsher, as had her mother’s. In the night Kristina lay in her attic bunk listening to the duet of coughing that came from her parent’s bed below. They coughed through the night and through the day as their bodies became weaker and weaker, shells of ashen skin and bones. So, more and more of the work of the farm fell to Kristina. She didn’t mind for she was big and strong, as strong as a man.
2  
Kristina’s mother looked up from her death bed and whispering in a rasping voice said, “My God, Kristina, I’m so very sorry…It’s not your fault that you’re ugly.” Then she died with open eyes, fixed and empty, staring into the unknown. In the center of each blue iris was a black, lifeless hole out of which her soul had flown.
“Yes, mother, I know,” Kristina whispered as tears flooded her eyes. “Know I’m ugly.”
Kristina wondered, what was the difference between her mother’s living eyes and her dead eyes?
The flame on the candle beside her mother’s bed wavered, then went out. Had the life force just gone out like the flame went out on a candle? Nothing had departed the candle. The condition for combustion had ceased to exist. Was life nothing more than a momentary existence like the flame of a candle?
Or did her mother have an immortal soul as Pastor Larsson had claimed? If so, what happened to it? Where had her mother’s soul gone?
Kristina re-lit the candle.
She refused to accept the possibility that her mother ceased to exist like the flame of a candle. To accept that would mean that all her suffering, pain and tears lacked meaning.
Kristina’s hand swept over her mother’s eyes to close their lids, to cover those fearful dark holes that none could abide because they forced the ultimate question.
In the glen behind the barn, framed with white birch trees, Kristina buried her mother beside her father’s fresh grave. Her parents had died within days of each other from pneumonia that flourished in the cold, damp shed of a house provided by their landlord.
Kristina patted the fresh mound of dirt with the shovel blade then paused to bow her head in silent good-byes to the last of he