The Jackal's Mistress: Chris Bohjalian's Novel of the Waning Confederacy

 

 

 

The Jackal’s Mistress (2025)

By Chris Bohjalian

Doubleday, 308 pages.

★★★★

 

The Civil War is the most written about subject in American history, hence it’s hardly surprising to see novelists try their hand. Vermont’s Chris Bohjalian is the latest. That surprised me, but he seldom repeats himself.

 

This review is headed by something I saw at the Valentine Museum in Richmond as I was reading Bohjalian: the remains of a statue of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy. It was spray-painted and pulled from its base on Monument Avenue in 2020, a leafy street that used to be lined with “heroes” of the Confederacy before anger over police killings of African Americans led young people to counterattack symbols of the Lost Cause. Romanticism of a noble experiment prevailed throughout the South for a century and a half after the Civil War ended. It was as if slavery had nothing to do with the conflict, which just happens to be the biggest load of horse exhaust in our history. The second is that Confederates were gallant and gentlemanly.

 

The Jackal’s Mistress takes us to the Shenandoah Valley in 1864, where Union generals such as Sheridan and Hunter conducted a scorched earth policy to break the Confederacy. Forgotten is that Confederacy also looted the region, especially General Jubal Early and the brutal John Mosby and his gang-like “rangers.” Early and Mosby commandeered slaves, confiscated farm animals, raided food larders, and summarily hanged “traitors.” By 1864, though, Grant was nearing Richmond and the Confederacy’s only hope was that Lincoln would lose reelection and a favorable peace could be negotiated. That’s not what happened.

 

Bohjalian reminds us that people die and are maimed until the ink is dry on the surrender papers. Maiming is the fate of Captain Jonathan Weybridge of the 11^th Vermont regiment. As his troops regrouped, he was hit so badly that he lost two fingers and a leg. He lost so much blood that it was near-certain he’d die. His comrades left him in an abandoned house near Berryville, Virginia, with minimal supplies because any attempt to move him behind Union lines would kill him.

 

Instead, an elderly freeman named Joseph and his wife Sally discover Weybridge. They  inform Libby Steadman, their white employer who lives with her younger niece Jubilee, and shares work, food, and occasional shelter with Joseph and Sally. Her husband Peter, last she heard, was wounded and in a Union POW camp in Ohio. When Joseph kills Libby’s potential rapist–probably one of Mosby’s Rangers–Libby must dispose of the body. Libby has been lucky in one respect; she runs a mill necessary to the Confederacy, but she must maintain the fiction that Joseph and Sally are her slaves. Libby hates the “blue-bellies” from the North, but decides to nurse Weybridge solely on the hope that some Yankee woman might have done the same for Peter. But Libby has a house full of trouble. If Mosby or Early find out about the dead attacker or that she’s hiding Weybridge, the entire makeshift household will be a postmortem one. 

 

What could go wrong? All Libby needs are guns and ammunition for protection, a doctor to bribe into silence, ways to prevent anyone from discovering Weybridge, unavailable medicines, whiskey to sterilize his wound, protein to help him regain strength, ways to keep neighbors from talking, and more luck than a riverboat gambler.

 

Do you suspect a potential romance? The discovery of shared humanity and mutual understanding? Forgive and forget? Don’t be so sure! Jubilee is so contemptuous of their Union patient that she dubs him “Jackal,” though she’s intrigued that he was a professor at Middlebury College before the war and shares the household contempt for slavery. (Peter Steadman freed Joseph and Sally before the war.) Besides, Weybridge has a wife and two sons back in Vermont. Lots of things happen, but not aways in predictable ways. The Jackal’s Mistress is a veritable page-turner that is touching, thrilling, tragic, and tense.

 

Several final notes. First, Bohjalian based his tale on the true-life tales of Lt. Henry Bedell of Westfield, Vermont, and Bettie Van Metre of Virginia, her imprisoned husband James, and her black friends Ginny and Dick Runner. Second, Berryville is about 20 miles from the Union stronghold of Harper’s Ferry, an indication of how close the Confederacy was to defeat. Finally, the Confederacy raided my Pennsylvania hometown three times and burned it in 1864. Not so gentlemanly!*

 

Rob Weir  

 

* One of Bohjalian’s characters provides a perfect postscript from 1937. Commenting on Richmond’s statue of J.E.B. Stuart on Monument Avenue she says, “… it’s hollow…. I find that telling. A hollow statue for a hollow cause.”