Gordon tells the nation’s history in a novel based on his family’s first American
Enterprise file photo — H. Rose Schneider
John Hamlin Gordon II talks about his book “Liberty’s Flight” during an Altamont Enterprise podcast last August.
HILLTOWNS — John Hamlin Gordon II, fueled by generations of family lore, has published his first book, “Liberty’s Flight.”
The historical novel starts with the Battle of Culloden in Scotland in 1745 and travels, along with the protagonist, to America. “The hero is based on Alexander Gordon, the first Gordon in the New World,” said John Gordon. Born in Scotland, he is buried in the American Revolutionary War veterans cemetery in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, John Gordon said.
Gordon, who lives in Medusa, has been working on the book for a decade. He will turn 70 on Sept. 1. “Liberty’s Flight” is the first in a series of four books he has planned.
His second book will portray the colonial struggle between France, England and Native Americans for dominance, he said. His third book will focus on the American Revolution, highlighting battle tactics and the spy business.
The fourth and final book in his series will tell “the untold story of Yorktown,” he said. “Everyone knows that Washington and Rochambeau beat the British,” he said of the American and French leaders who were victorious in the battle at Yorktown.
But, he said, few people know that, when the British lieutenant general, Charles Cornwallis, surrendered, the slaves he had liberated were “stuck in the slugfest.”
“They had terrible casualties and those who lived were rounded up and taken back to the plantations … So Yorktown was the very first battle of the Civil War,” Gordon said. “It led to the establishment of a true republic set up by Abraham Lincoln.”
Published by Covenant Books of Murrells Inlet, South Carolina, “Liberty’s Flight” is on sale at bookstores or online at the Apple iTunes store, Amazon, or Barnes and Noble. Asked who should read his book, Gordon said, “Everybody coming across the border so they know what we know.”
He reflected a moment and added, “Really, everyone should read the book. My wife is a schoolteacher. People in our generation, we knew history, we knew what Yorktown was. Today, they don’t know it.”
Gordon concluded that, while the characters in his book are largely fictional, the landscape in which their personal dramas play out is historically accurate.
“I have my historical facts straight,” he said.
