Secret Yankees

During the American Civil War, a small group of Unionists found themselves trapped in the largest Southern city between Richmond and New Orleans. Atlanta was a Confederate bastion. The military ruled, and it brooked little dissent. But, as this work demonstrates, the Confederate military hadn't reckoned on Cyrena Stone. A Vermont native, Cyrena moved to Atlanta with her husband, Amherst, in 1854. After war broke out Amherst escaped to the North, but Cyrena remained behind. Hiding her small Union flag in her sugar bowl, suppressing but not moderating her well-known pro-Northern views, she belonged to a secret circle of Unionists - white and black, male and female - who lived in fear of their lives but nevertheless managed to aid Union prisoners of war, protect the interests of the slaves and freedmen, and spirit military intelligence out of the city - eventually to the benefit of Sherman's advancing army. A story of loyalty and patriotism, this work draws on sources such as a long-lost diary and a work of purported fiction based closely on Stone's experience.
It seeks to bring the adventures of the Atlanta Unionists to life, as deprivation and suspicion tightened like a noose around them in the closing, increasingly desperate years of the war. Arrested on suspicion of spying (the penalty was death) but released by the Southern authorities, her house destroyed by Union shelling during the fall of Atlanta, Cyrena Stone survived the war to see the triumph of the cause for which she had risked her life.