A Son of Kentucky

A Son of Kentucky chronicles the life of Josiah Johnson, a starve-acre, tobacco farmer living outside a small town in western Kentucky, on the banks of a tributary of the Tennessee River, in the ante-be1lum South. Johnson's relative poverty is primarily due to his rather public unwillingness to use slave labor, a moral position viewed with suspicion and derision, by his neighbors. Both Johnson and his wife, Sara, are passionate abolitionists, their mutual detestation of the institution being responsible for their becoming acquainted in the first place.

Shortly after General Beauregard fires on Fort Sumter, Josiah feels compelled to answer President Lincoln's call, and travels North to Ohio to enlist as a private in the Union Army, leaving behind Sara, his infant daughter Elizabeth and, Cecile their black woman servant. For nearly two years, Josiah fights on battlefields from Maryes Heights, to Chancellorsville, finally to Gettysburg where he is wounded in action while saving his Colonel's life. As Josiah fights for what he and Sara believe is right, back home in Kentucky Sara battles for her family's survival, barely subsisting with the aid of a wealthy woman whose husband is also away fighting, and the coots they are able to shoot on the river.

While lying in the putrid filth and stench of a Union Army hospital, Josiah receives the Medal of Honor. The war is over for him in one sense, but he must fight another war with himself. He is tortured by doubts and uncertainties, tortured by his injured leg, which stubbornly refuses to heal. After an endless trip by troop train, he finally reaches his farm riding on a borrowed mule. The farm is plainly in shambles. Ashamed of his wound he hesitates to make his return known to his family. He seeks solace by visiting his father's grave. There he breaks down entirely, weeping inconsolably not so much for himself, as for all the death and senseless carnage he has witnessed, the countless men and boys wearing blue and grey uniforms who will never come home, in life or in death.

Michael R. Zomber was born in Washington D.C. and educated at Oberlin College, Villanova University, the University of Illinois, and UCLA. He received his M.A. in English Literature from UCLA. At the age of nine, while attending a Boy Scout Jamboree in Eastern Pennsylvania he was fascinated by an 1873 trapdoor Springfield rifle standing in the corner of a recreation of an old country store. That antique gun was the beginning of an interest in early American history and a study of early American firearms and swords that has lasted for more than fifty years.

From the finest Winchesters to magnificently engraved percussion Colt revolvers, Zomber has examined thousands of arms in museums, private collections, and world famous auction houses all over Europe and the Americas. In the 1990's he assisted producer Yann DeBonne during production of the groundbreaking A&E television show, The Story of the Gun, which became the long running History Channel series, Tales of the Gun. He appears in nearly a dozen episodes as a featured historian including Million Dollar Guns, Guns of the Famous, and Dueling Pistols.