The Strange and Tragic Wounds of George Cole's America

A gripping tale of determination, betrayal, and the struggle for dignity amid societal and personal chaos.

In The Strange and Tragic Wounds of George Cole's America, historian Michael deGruccio offers a gripping tale of ambition, self-making, and tragedy set against the backdrop of the American Civil War and its aftermath. George Cole was a once-hopeful Union soldier whose dreams of heroism and societal recognition unraveled in the chaos of war and personal betrayal at home. Haunted by the war's brutalities, Cole struggled to reclaim his dignity in a post-war nation that, in his mind, had forsaken the most deserving.

When he returned home to upstate New York after the war, Cole discovered that his wife had been seduced—or had been raped—by their family attorney. At first glance, Cole's story is straightforward: he murders their attorney, is tried (twice), and is acquitted. But in deGruccio's telling, the murder, like a flash of lightning, illuminates a vast landscape in striking detail. By mining court transcripts, newspapers, private letters and wills, memoirs, and military records, deGruccio pieces together a noir tale of American life in the nineteenth century, one given to desperate self-improvement.

This meticulously researched microhistory of a pained veteran explores how increasing rights for women, the end of slavery, expanding access to market goods, burgeoning towns and cities, the madness of war, and the congealing corruption in government and business brought a new birth of fraught freedom.