A father. A son. A war that turns neighbor against neighbor.
In the divided mountains of East Tennessee, loyalty isn’t a matter of politics-it’s a matter of survival.
Harrison Self is a farmer who wants nothing to do with the Civil War. He believes in staying out of it, keeping his land, and protecting his family. But when his teenage son is drawn into a dangerous Unionist plot to burn Confederate railroad bridges, that distance collapses overnight.
Within days, Harry is arrested, accused of treason, and thrown into a system where trials are little more than theater and a single accusation can end in the noose.
What follows is not a battlefield story, but something closer, more dangerous. A world where neighbors watch each other too closely, where loyalties shift without warning, and where survival depends on choices no one should have to make.
Inspired by the true story of Harrison Self and the 1861 East Tennessee bridge burnings, The Reluctant Patriot is a work of Civil War historical fiction that brings to life a lesser-known chapter of American history-one where the war was fought not just between armies, but within families and communities.
As violence closes in and trust erodes, Harry is forced to confront the question he’s spent his life avoiding: what do you stand for when staying neutral is no longer an option?
Rich in historical detail and grounded in real events, this is a story of divided loyalties, moral courage, and the quiet, devastating cost of war-perfect for readers drawn to character-driven historical fiction and overlooked stories from the Civil War era.
Excerpt
[The Prologue introduces Harrison Self, an East Tennessee farmer inadvertently caught up in a plot to sabotage a Confederate railway bridge. At this pivotal moment, he is entering not only a grim prison, but an unknown world that will test and change him as a human being.]
As he was pushed through the door, Harry struck his chin against the skull of the man in front of him, who was about a head shorter. “Forgive me,” he murmured, but the words were jarred from his lips as he was butted from behind. Once he was inside the room, a big cavern of a place it seemed, he was still bumping shoulders with the men around him. And then the smell hit him.
Harry was a farmer. His nose was accustomed to the ammonia of cow dung and horse manure. But this was different. Soon enough, he’d know why, but there were other things to learn first. Like everyone, he was scanning the faces he could see, hoping, yet not hoping, to find a friend, or at least an acquaintance. He was mortally sure that some of his Greeneville neighbors were prisoners like him, and perhaps Alex and Jake were here, too, and maybe Henry and Tom. There were, he guessed, upwards of one hundred twenty, thirty, maybe fifty people sharing the fetid air, but for almost an hour, his world was ten or twelve persons wide.
There were no chairs, no benches, and so they fell into approximations of comfort. The lucky ones leaned against a roughly plastered wall. Others squatted, frog-like. Who thought of it, he didn’t know, but suddenly, there were pairs of men who pasted their spines together and sank down to the floor, sitting back to back, with their arms around their knees. Harry wasn’t that tired. He didn’t relish the vulnerability of those bookend pairs, stapled to the floor, bruised unintentionally by the feet of others. Coated with filth. He’d stand. For a while yet.
The next lesson had to do with sustenance. Word spread that there was a bucket near the window closest to the door, with a tin dipper. If you squeezed your way there, and if you were lucky, there was liquid inside. Harry had arrived late in the day, riding with bound hands the more than sixty miles from Greeneville to Knoxville. “If you hadn’t burned the bridge, you’d be riding on the railroad,” the guard had jibed, apparently forgetting that if the bridge hadn’t been burned, Harry would be home now. But it had, with no help or advice from him, and here he was, and he was hungry.
The light was already fading when the door opened, a barrel was shoved through, followed by two guards, one carrying a knobby sack. Like leaves finding the current of a stream, the men began to move, blindly at first, until a queue emerged at the center of a milling crowd. Harry was reluctant at first to use his elbows, but soon he had no choice. To keep his feet under him, he pushed and jostled until the flow delivered him to the door through which, only an hour, a lifetime, ago, he’d entered this hellhole. He learned that plates were shards of broken pottery or rough hemispheres of wood. He was taught that food was a lump of something dark, heaved up from the barrel and dumped into his bowl. Behind him, somebody said, “And where is mine host today?” The joke, gleaned from other comments, was that the man who ran the jail was an innkeeper. Once a day, he carted over to the prison the slop barrel from behind his flea-ridden hotel.
Grass. Tender, fresh blades of grass. That was the difference. In the intestines of animals, grass becomes something just as natural, something with a warm and earthy tang that blends with the smell of hay. What passed for food here, plopped in cracked bowls, smeared on slats of wood, had the greenish iridescence of decay, the slime of liquefaction. Even in the dim light, Harry could see the black specks moving in the broken chunks of bread the second guard, with a flourish, whipped from his sack and deposited on top of the . . . other things. In the bowels of dirty, coughing, weeping men, fear worked on these scraps, turning them into something hard as pellets or runny as snot, as putrid as gangrene.
When night arrived, it brought a simple problem in arithmetic. On a floor of x number of square feet, how many men—ranging in height from five to six feet, and in breadth from twenty to thirty inches—can lie, head to foot, side by side, in the bed of their clothes? Answer: only about half of them. The room wasn’t big enough for everyone to recline, so some of the men stood while the rest of them slept. In the small hours, with groans and curses, the prone were hauled to their feet and the upright took their place. Harry had been one of the ones standing, too shocked by his environment to close his eyes. Now he watched in dismay, heard thudding bodies, and sank to the floor, too. He stretched out his legs carefully. Behind his head, he rolled his collar for support. The hardness of the wood assaulted him, but he flowed into it. The snoring began again. If you are weary enough . . . you can sleep . . . anywhere. . . .
That was the last lesson of the first day.
Amazon US: https://www.amazon.com/Reluctant-Patriot-Novel-Based-Tennessee-ebook/dp/B08XSMTW7S
Meet Susan Lohafer
A graduate of Harvard University (B.A., magna cum laude), Stanford University (M.A. in Creative Writing), and New York University (Ph.D. in American Literature), Susan spent her academic career at the University of Iowa, where she specialized in short fiction theory and narrative structure.
Her previous books include Coming to Terms with the Short Story and Reading for Storyness: Preclosure Theory, Empirical Poetics, and Culture in the Short Story, as well as the co-edited volume Short Story Theory at a Crossroads. Her shorter works have appeared in publications such as The Southern Review, and a 2011 essay was on the “Notable” list in The Best American Essays.. She lives in Tennessee.
Website: https://reluctantpatriot1861.com/
