THE COLOR OF PRAYER : A Civil War novel in progress

The Color of Prayer is a novel of the love and courage of an Ohio boy, the girl he left behind, and the cost of conscience in the American Civil War, when the prayers of all could not be answered.

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This novel is inspired by the author’s great-grandfather’s Civil War diaries and letters, discovered hidden in an Ohio attic for more than 100 years.

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In 1860, 16-year-old Edwin Lybarger defies Ohio’s laws to help a black friend attend all-white Springcreek Academy, unleashing the same violent passions that divide North and South.

After the peace is lost at Fort Sumter in 1861, Edwin and his friends join Knox County’s Company K in the 43^rd Ohio Volunteer Infantry, eager that the war has lasted long enough for them to turn 18, learn soldiering, and stop treason. Their first battle is the exhilarating capture of a rebel fort in Missouri. But the romance soon washes away as friends die by accident, disease, and enemy fire. Edwin stops praying, witnessing that men with the most desperate prayers are always the first to die.

Badly wounded at Corinth, he gains the courage to walk again by losing his heart to Sophronia Adams, his most loyal correspondent from home. Her faith and loyalty help him return to his regiment to win the war to “make the country what it should be.” Blessedly, finally, the war tide begins to turn when Vicksburg falls to Grant, Lee is defeated at Gettysburg, and Confederate raider John Morgan is caught in Ohio and jailed for a horse thief.

On a brief home furlough, Edwin is re-united with Sophronia, but his intentions are thwarted by her father’s appeal to his honor to wait and make his proposal when—if—he returns at war’s end. Putting his faith in Gen. Sherman, he barely escapes capture at the siege of Atlanta. He leads a foraging party on Sherman’s Big March through the heart of slavery and dares to dream of peace, when all are free, when the enemy surrenders, when God is finally willing of mercy. Dare he dream of seeing Sophronia again?

“The prayers of all could not be answered,” President Lincoln told an embittered nation near war’s end. Based on the author’s great-grandfather’s letters and diaries hidden in an Ohio attic for more than a hundred years, The Color of Prayer is a vivid, poignant tale of the war that forged an America worthy of all.

 Writing

THE COLOR OF PRAYER

by Jennifer L. Wilke

Musket Balls

Grandfather Lybarger was a history teacher in Coshocton, Ohio and loved to tell stories. I was 5 years old when he lifted me in his arms to look into a metal box he kept on the mantel in the house on Cambridge Road.

The box held a half-dozen round marbles that were as heavy as stones, some with a pointy side and a flat side. He said they were bullets from the Civil War. My great-grandfather was shot in the knee by one in a battle at Corinth. The Rebels shot him. His name was Edwin Lewis Lybarger. He helped to win the Civil War.

My grandfather had a stroke a year later that robbed him of speech, and we never had another conversation about family and history. He was Edwin’s only son, and it would be another 50 years before I found his handwritten account of the stories his father had told him.

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“Neuralgia of the heart”

I sat under the apple tree in Aunt Nancy Lybarger Rhodes’ back yard one sunny summer day in Ashland, Ohio and traced my ancestors in the several books of family geneology she gave me. I read that a great-great something of mine had died and, a few months later, the book said, his wife died of “neuralgia of the heart.” I asked what that was. Aunt Nancy said, “She died of a broken heart.”

She took me to visit the old Workman Cemetary in Danville, Ohio, to the grave of my great-great-grandmother Amelia Crum Lybarger (1813-1902). Her younger son, my great-grandfather Edwin Lewis Lybarger, erected the largest memorial in the cemetery to his first wife, Sophronia Warren Rogers Lybarger (1845-1882), dead of typhoid at age 37, childless. The obelisk supporting a robed, winged statue has these words inscribed:

Stronger than steel

Is the sword of the Spirit;

Swifter than arrows

The light of the truth is.

Greater than anger

Is love, and endureth.

Also in Workman Cemetery, Amelia’s grandson Jesse Lybarger erected a grave marker to his first wife Sylvia Lockhart Lybarger (1869-1891, dead at age 22, childless) with a big marble globe etched with a map of the world. Around the equator, large letters proclaim:

Sylvia–she was the whole world to me.

I’m descended from people who lived and loved, had their hearts cruelly broken, carried on. I was inordinately sad that it was impossible for me to meet any of them. Or was it?

The Rhineland to Pennsylvania

Sept. 7, 2006

Edwin Lybarger’s granddaughter Nancy Lybarger Rhoades, on her 90th birthday, received the confirming letter from Swallow Press director David Sanders that her manuscript of the Lybarger letters was accepted for publication, with the addition of social historian Lucy E. Bailey’s commentary. Although she died before the book’s 2009 publication, Nancy was thrilled to be co-editor of this legacy of Lybarger family history, to which she devoted much care and attention throughout her life.