Civil War Novels with Antebellum Settings
Many Civil war novels depend on backstories that reach well into antebellum times. The onset of the war is, in retrospect, inseparable from the 1861-65 years themselves. Fictions that concern the border wars in Kansas or John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry are also clearly fictions of the Civil War, though their settings precede formal combat between the Union and the Confederacy.
- Banks, Russell. Cloudsplitter. 1998.
- Settle, Mary Lee. Know Nothing. 1960.
- Shaara, Jeff. Gods and Generals. 1996.