Novel · Illinois, 1861
The Long Road to Lovington
A Civil War Novel Based on the True Story of Samuel S. Boggs
In June 1861, twenty-one-year-old Samuel S. Boggs left his family, his friends, and the small farming community of Lovington, Illinois, to answer President Lincoln’s call for volunteers. Like thousands of young men across the North, he believed the rebellion would be put down quickly and that he would soon return home. Instead, the road ahead would carry him across hundreds of miles, through some of the hardest fighting of the Civil War, and ultimately into the nightmare of Confederate captivity.
Serving with Company E of the 21st Illinois Volunteer Infantry—the regiment first commanded by Ulysses S. Grant—Sam marched and fought through Missouri, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Georgia. He experienced his first battle at Fredericktown, endured the exhausting campaigns and illnesses that claimed almost as many soldiers as enemy bullets, and survived the terrible fighting at Perryville and Stones River. Through it all, his letters home reveal a young man determined to reassure his family, confident that the war must surely be nearing its end, and longing for the people and life he had left behind.
Then came Chickamauga.
In September 1863, Confederate forces overwhelmed Sam and many of his comrades of the 21st Illinois. Surrounded and with their retreat cut off, they were forced to surrender. For Sam, the war changed in an instant. He was no longer a soldier carrying a musket alongside men he had known since Illinois. He was a prisoner entirely dependent upon his captors for food, shelter—and survival.
His journey through the Confederate prison system took him from the uncertainty of capture to imprisonment at Richmond and Danville and finally to the infamous stockade at Andersonville, Georgia. Hunger, disease, exposure, overcrowding, and death became part of everyday existence. Men who had survived battle now struggled simply to survive another day. Sam watched fellow prisoners weaken and die while his own body wasted away.
Yet even in captivity, he refused to surrender the hope that sustained him: someday he would go home.
After nearly eighteen months as a prisoner of war, Samuel Boggs finally returned to Union lines in 1865. The young farmer who had left Lovington four years earlier was almost unrecognizable. War and imprisonment had reduced his body, but they had not destroyed his determination to return to the people he loved.
The Long Road to Lovington is a work of historical fiction based on the true Civil War experiences of the author’s great-great-grandfather, Samuel S. Boggs. Drawing upon Sam’s surviving wartime letters, military records, his own later account of Confederate imprisonment, and the documented history of the 21st Illinois Infantry, Eric L. Qualkenbush reconstructs the world Sam experienced—not from the perspective of generals and politicians, but through the eyes of an ordinary soldier caught in extraordinary events.
It is a story of battle and captivity, but also of family, friendship, endurance, and home. Above all, it is the story of one young Illinois soldier’s four-year journey through war and imprisonment—and the long road that finally brought him back to Lovington.
