The Jenkins of Baltimore

“Lots of tension!” “Well done and believable!” “good attention to the craft of writing” says Pacific Northwest Writers Association about JENKINS: Confederate Blockade Runner.

Historians in Florida call this season’s Civil War saga simply, “Wonderful!”.

For every American family whose ancestors suffered the Civil War, JENKINS: Confederate Blockade Runner was written. Based on personal letters, Civil War era photograph albums, and historical documents this saga tells of a Union~Confederate family whose loyalties were torn as the drumbeats of war advanced.

The men of the Jenkins family, their business ambitions and political perspectives; the women of the Colburn family, their fashions, their lifestyle, are all included in this well-researched debut novel. Losses, loves, and loyalties play on the reader’s imagination as Ms. Hill sets the domestic scene of what the 1903 Baltimore Sun described as “Baltimore’s Well-Known Family”.

Beginning in 1820s Baltimore, Maryland JENKINS: Confederate Blockade Runner takes the reader on a ride with Newburne’s Company of Mounted Rifles, through the settler days of Fair Haven, Vermont and along the beautiful Gulf Coast, ravaged by the Civil War.

Inspired by the photograph album of family pictures that kept Colonel C.T. Jenkins, of the Florida Fourth, CSA, company during his incarceration as a convicted blockade runner, author Emily Hill, “A Civil War Lady” and current caretaker of that album weaves a drama that is receiving high praise from writer’s conferences, Florida historians, and historical fiction enthusiasts.

Historically true to the facts, emotionally true to the past.

Included in this novel are portrayals of Colonel Jenkins’ family members including James Ryder Randall, author of ‘Maryland, My Maryland’, Admiral Semmes – a cousin to Colonel Jenkins; and members of Vermont’s Colburn family, Albert V. Colburn, a Union Officer and West Point graduate of 1857 and his iron-willed mother, Lucy Davey Colburn.

Genealogists will appreciate the detail and accuracy of the novel’s sweep.

A dramatic, gender-inclusive saga of family history and Civil War tragedy.