Battle Flag

Complicating Starbuck's life is his own father, the fiercely partisan Yankee Reverend Elial Starbuck, who has been thwarted in his ambition to preach the first sermon from a captured rebel pulpit in Richmond, but has managed to gain possession of the captured battle flag of his renegade son's regiment. In the meantime, Nate Starbuck and his men march in Stonewall Jackson's dazzling flank attack that hooks deep behind John Pope's army and take part in some of the Civil War's most extraordinary scenes: the Confederate capture of Bristoe Station and the frantic wrecking of the trains that followed, then the gargantuan sack of the Manassas depot, which leads directly into the novel's climax, the violent and blood-drenched field of Second Manassas.