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In Ghost Soldier, Alexander meets the ghost of Private Richeson Francis Chamblee, a fictional boy who fought and died in the assault on Fort Stedman at the Siege of Petersburg in Virginia, near the end of the War Between the States. The Confederate assault on Fort Stedman was a real battle, in which units of the besieged Confederate Army made a last, desperate attempt to break through General Grant's Union lines.
Under the command of General Gordon, Confederate soldiers successfully seized Fort Stedman in a surprise attack at dawn, but they couldn't hold the fort against an overwhelming Union counterattack. Gordon only managed to pull some of his men back safely because a unit of North Carolina soldiers covered their retreat. In this story, Private Chamblee is one of those North Carolina soldiers who stands fast against the Union troops in Fort Stedman, and dies covering his comrades' retreat.
But Private Chamblee cannot rest, because he needs to know what happened to his family, especially his sister Louise, caught in the path of Sherman's March through the Carolinas. When his spirit returns to their farm after his death to make sure that they have survived, he finds a burned-out farmhouse and fields. The only sign that Louise might have survived is a metal box in their secret hiding place in a grove of oak trees - a box that a ghost cannot take out and open.
Alexander, a boy who lives today, has long been able to look through a window into the past to see ghosts - it's a secret he shared with his mother. Since she abandoned him and his father, however, Alexander has been trying to find some way to prove himself in hopes that she will come back for him. When his father takes him to North Carolina to meet the woman he hopes to marry, Alexander hates everything about the trip - even Private Chamblee's ghost, at least in the beginning. But a sympathy for another boy trying to hold onto his family, and the hope that he might be able to prove himself to his mother by helping the ghost, moves Alexander to agree to go to the site of the Chamblee farm to get Louise's metal box - only to discover that construction crews have cleared the land for industrial development, and the box has disappeared!
Using the Internet, County Archives, and small historical museums, Alexander tries to track the Chamblee family for his new friend. In the end, he realizes he can only solve Richeson's mystery by stepping through the window into the past and experiencing the horror of Sherman's raid on the Chamblee farm for himself - in the hopes that he can find Louise, and learn what happened to her that night.
I wrote Ghost Soldier because The Ghost Cadet was so well loved. Readers had long asked me to write a sequel to it, but I'd felt that Benjy's and Cadet McDowell's story was complete already. When my editor at Henry Holt came to me and proposed that I write a new War Between the States ghost story as a companion book instead, Alexander and Richeson Chamblee came into focus, and a new story was born.
2004 Young Hoosier Book Award Winner for
Grades 4-62002 Society of Midland Authors Award Winner for
Best Children's Fiction2002 Edgar Allan Poe Award Nominee for
Best Juvenile MysteryA Junior Library Guild Selection
An
Accelerated Reader Title