A Little Traitor to the South

Charleston, 1864: Union warships have sealed the harbor, and the Confederacy’s one answer is the David, a thirty-foot iron cigar driven by five men on a hand crank that has drowned crew after crew without once hurting the enemy. Fanny Glen nurses the wounded and is loved by two Confederate officers, steady Rhett Sempland and the charming, dissipated Harry Lacy. When Sempland wins command of the torpedo run against Admiral Vernon’s flagship, Fanny locks him in her strong room, because the admiral is the father she disowned when he stayed with the Union. Lacy goes in his place. Brady called the book a war-time comedy with a tragic interlude and meant both: the sortie that follows really happened, and his preface names the men who never came back.