Rising tide : novel of the Civil War
(Book)

Before Confederate troops occupied Knoxville, and long before the eruption of the Hatfield and McCoy feud, life bordered on idyllic for the Kincaids. In the watershed of the Little Tennessee River, sheltered beside the narrow creek-side meadows, Jess married his Cherokee sweetheart, while brother Hamp made merry at the barn dances, not knowing or caring that a majority of Knoxville residents voted against secession. Peace would not last, not in this deeply conflicted land with parson Brownlow--later the most hated and reviled governor in Tennessee history--using his paper the Knoxille Whig to trumpet against separation in terms so graphic he was hung in effigy. The Kincaid family and the neighboring roughneck boys, the Edgars, were not initially opposed, but soon found themselves swept into the middle of a brewing war as conflicts grew and they faced the persistent threat of a Union invasion. Even the Cherokee Legion became involved in the fray. People in the Tennessee valleys and mountains who had built peaceful homesteads for their growing families could not avoid being changed by the rising tide of war.