Earlier this year, I drove out to Manassas, Virginia, to stand on the ground where the Civil War stopped being an idea.
In July of 1861 it was not a solemn place. Washington lay some twenty-five miles off, and when word spread that the armies would meet near a creek called Bull Run, congressmen and society families rode out to watch. They brought food. They brought opera glasses. They expected to see the North settle the whole business in an afternoon and be home for supper.
They were sure. Both sides were sure. The soldiers marching in expected one battle and a quick trip home.
By the end of the day the casualties on both sides ran to nearly five thousand, more than any battle on American soil had produced before, and the Union army was streaming back toward the capital in a panic the newspapers would name the Great Skedaddle. Some of the picnickers ended up in that same road, fleeing beside the soldiers they had come to watch.
I stood by one of the guns that afternoon and thought about how strange it must have been to arrive expecting a show and leave understanding the thing had only just begun.
There is a statue of Stonewall Jackson on that field, and the line carved into its base, “There stands Jackson like a stone wall,” is the reason the man is remembered by that name. What the plaque does not tell you is that the general who said it, Barnard Bee, was mortally wounded that same day and dead by the next, and never explained what he meant. Historians still argue. Some read it as praise, Jackson holding the line like a wall. Others read it as a complaint, Jackson standing there while Bee’s own men were cut to pieces. The most famous nickname of the war may have started as an insult. Nobody living can say.
That is what pulled me in while I was writing Knights. Bull Run did not decide the war. It decided something quieter and more dangerous. It killed the belief that the war would be short.
Short wars give movements nothing to work with. Long ones, with no end in sight and the lists of the dead growing, give them everything. The fear that settled over the North after that afternoon, the dawning sense that this would be longer and bloodier than anyone had promised, became the ground that men like the Knights of the Golden Circle would later grow in.
The Knights did not create the dread. They fed on it.
On this day in 1864, three summers after the crowds rode out to watch a quick victory, John Bell Hood was throwing his men against Union earthworks outside Atlanta, near a chapel called Ezra Church. It was the third such attack he had ordered in nine days. He lost close to three thousand men that afternoon. The Federals lost a few hundred. Asked afterward how many of his side were left, a Confederate soldier is said to have answered, “about enough for another killing.” That is what the afternoon’s victory had become.
From the Trail One Legend, One Fact
The Legend
They say the Knights read Bull Run as a signal. That the rout proved the North had no stomach for a long fight, and that the Union could be broken from the inside if the war were only dragged out long enough. In this telling, Manassas is the day the order stopped dreaming of a southern empire and started planning to rot the North from within.
The Fact
Bull Run broke exactly one thing: the belief that the war would be quick. That was enough. It handed every peace faction in the North, the Copperheads and the Knights of the Golden Circle among them, the one condition they needed to grow, a war with no end in sight. But the organized subversion came later, in the hard years of 1862 through 1864, not on that July afternoon. And how far it truly reached is murkier than either the order or the men hunting it ever admitted. Both had their reasons to make it sound larger than it was.
PS. If the idea that the war never really ended stays with you after this, that is the ground Knights of the Golden Circle stands on. It goes live August 18, the book this dispatch has been circling, the one where the Knights stop changing history and start hiding inside it.
The Kindle edition is $5.99 on preorder and rises to $7.99 the day it launches. If you want to start now, the first six chapters are free.
Meet Priya
One more thing before I sign off. Most of you have met Jack, Emma, and Steve by now. Fewer of you have met Priya Patel, and that's on me. Her story, Priya and the Language of Normal, has been sitting behind a locked door since I put it up, and it turns out almost nobody found the key. She's the reason Emma has a phone number to call when things go sideways. She's also the reason a piece of Knights works the way it does. I'm taking the lock off. No email needed, just the story.
Priya's isn't the only one. There are more free stories waiting at davidlengauthor.com/free.
Start the Series
New to the hunt? Start where it all began. Shadows Over Cozumel is free, and The Search for Braddock’s Lost Gold, the 2025 PenCraft Thriller of the Year, is where Jack Sullivan’s obsession starts.
One Question
That morning at Bull Run, both sides were certain the war would be over by supper. Knowing only what they knew, which would you have believed, that it was nearly finished, or that it had barely begun? I would genuinely like to know.
Know someone who’d like this one?
Send them the Jackson story. No sign-up needed on their end, it’s just a page.
Someone forward this to you?
I send these periodically. Real history, buried secrets, and the stories behind the Echoes of Fortune series. Start with Shadows Over Cozumel, free. It’s a Kirkus “GET IT” Pick and most people finish it in one sitting.
Get Cozumel freeFrom Other Authors
A few books from authors I’ve traded features with this month. Each sits in a different lane, so I’ll tell you plainly what kind of read it is and let the book make its own case.
In Daniel’s words: The past was never buried. It was just waiting for the right moment to strike. Across Paris, Rome, and London, figures tied to the Vatican are falling to a silent, ancient weapon, each crime scene marked with a warning in medieval ink and the sign of a forgotten brotherhood. Pulled reluctantly into the investigation, military historian Dr. Gabriel Voss finds this is no simple attack on the Papacy but the collection of a seven-hundred-year-old debt, and the answer is buried in his own family’s legacy.
A change of water from mine. David’s Brice Bannon books are modern seacoast action-adventure, and this one opens the series with a threatened ocean liner and enemies who leave no safe harbor in sight. It is the saltwater cousin of the Echoes world, so if Cozumel was your favorite stretch of my series, this lane will feel familiar.
Furthest from my usual territory, and a change of pace if you want one. Mirrored Murder is a crime and domestic-suspense thriller, one funeral and one killer and, in Linda’s words, a woman who refuses to let the truth stay buried. If cat-and-mouse fraud and murder is a read you enjoy, it is worth a look.
A fish-plant worker in a dying coastal village feels something pulling her toward the cliffs where the sea took her father. Miles North’s The Last Shift is a short, eerie prequel, a quiet piece of coastal horror for readers who don’t mind the North Atlantic at its coldest.
Until next time, keep hunting.
David R Leng
Echoes of Fortune. The Past Refuses to Stay Buried… It Echoes into the Present.