Nowhere Else on Earth by Josephine Humphreys

Second Hand 

In the summer of 1864, the citizens of Robeson County on the banks of the Lumbee River in North Carolina have become pawns in the devestation created by the depredations of the War between the States. The community, loosely known as Scuffletown, lives in fear of the marauding Union army but is also hectored by the desperate Home Guard, hell-bent on conscripting the youth into deadly forced labor in the salt works of the Confederacy. These are the circumstances under which we meet sixteen-year-old Rhoda Strong, the daughter of a dourly complaisant Scotsman and his "American" wife who is part Indian and part a lot of other things. Rhoda is fiercely loyal to her family but is also fiercely in love with young Henry Berry Lowrie who, though he is a thief and is being sought as a murderer, is cut of heroic cloth and is, finally, a man whose moral fiber dictates his every move.

Josephine Humphreys has grounded her wholly engrossing tale on solid historical research, and has distilled from it a saga of duplicity and honor, of bloody injustice and unsung glory; the reader will not soon forget her brilliantly heart-wrenching account of an execution as witnessed by Rhoda and her two small children. The author's passionate plumbing of the human soul is very much in the foreground of this astonishing novel.