Book Sales Are On!

Okay. Now that the publication date of March 23,2015 has come, book sales are officially under way. I can't tell how many copies have been sold on amazon.com and Barnes and Noble, but I had an impromptu book signing at the Kinston Civil War Round Table meeting tonight and sold my first 15 copies. Gatlin's story wraps itself around many of the major events of the 19th century and I really want it to get out there into the reading public. I'll bet you did not know, for example, that as a new West Point graduate in 1832 Gatlin and several of his newly graduated classmates volunteered to join General Winfield Scott on the first Great Lakes military steamboat armada, from Buffalo, NY to Fort Dearborn, IL, to fight in the Black Hawk War. Unfortunately, a deadly cholera outbreak short-circuited the voyage, several hundred soldiers died, and the West Pointers returned to Buffalo having faced the army's greatest enemy - disease. That was the first, but not the last time that Gatlin would come face to face with death and win. His family was not so lucky however. Check out Richard Gatlin and the Confederate Defense of Eastern North Carolina. It's not just a Civil War book.