John Yates Beall, Son of the South: The Life and Death of a Confederate Privateer

John Beall, a Confederate soldier whose execution President Lincoln upheld despite appeals for clemency from his staff, was a scion of a prominent Virginia family. Wounded while fighting with Stonewall Jackson’s legendary brigade, he fled to Canada intending to sit out the war.

Beall found a way back into the war that did not involve the killing he came to abhor, engaging in privateering on the Chesapeake Bay. Captured and released in a prisoner exchange, he made a daring attempt to free Confederate prisoners on Lake Erie’s Johnson’s Island. He was arrested while passing through Niagara Falls. This time there would be no reprieve--he was falsely charged with espionage and sentenced to be hanged. Lincoln anguished over his decision to uphold Beall’s sentence, knowing full well he was sending an innocent man to his death. As this book describes, Beall’s story is full of pathos that blurs the lines between right and wrong in a war that lingers in the American imagination to the present day.

Ken Lizzio is a professor of anthropology and Middle East Studies and an international development specialist and has written several books on the American West. He lives in Lexington, Virginia.