Consider these two premises: First, in 1865, the Confederacy is collapsing, and President Davis, concerned about the funds in the treasury, sends a young naval officer out on a wild expedition to hide the gold, to be used some day to help the South.

Second, in 2005, knowledge of the whereabouts of the hidden gold comes into the possession of a young descendant of the naval officer, and the members of a “neoconfederate” society known as the Fellowship of the South are determined to keep the gold and put it to its intended purpose, but first they have to frustrate the schemes of federal agents.

If this sounds like the plot outline of a cheap thriller, that would be half right.  The Hunt for Confederate Gold is a thriller with many familiar elements: an alienated hero who only finds himself in accomplishing his mission; a stubborn young woman who challenges his assumptions before joining the crusade; a crusty old scholar of the Old School who just happens to possess the encyclopedic knowledge necessary to put key pieces of an historical puzzle together; a power-crazed federal agent so obsessed with his own virtue that he is happy to trample on the Bill of Rights and destroy the lives of ordinary people.  H. Rider Haggard meets Dean Koontz.

As a novel, Hunt is little more than a good read for a weekend at the beach.  Indeed, Thomas Moore’s first piece of fiction is not without flaws.  The opening scenes in Richmond are as stilted and stiff as a Civil War pageant; yet, though some readers might be tempted to put down the book after reading a few pages, the story picks up very quickly when we come to the present.  And, to be fair to the author, later historical scenes portraying the heroic effort to hide the gold are absorbing, and the young officer, Edmond Marchand, is the incarnation of a gallant Southern officer.

The collateral descendant of Marchand (Moore’s protagonist), George Trenholm Bolitho—inevitably nicknamed “Bo”—is his counterpart in the New South.  Also a brave and honorable officer, Bo served in both Iraq wars, but, unable to stomach the brutal campaign against Iraqi civilians, he has not reenlisted and has gone back to South Carolina to study Southern history at the University of South Carolina.  While Marchand knew that his duty was to his country, Bo no longer knows what his country is, though he is not ready to subscribe to the Southern nationalist views of his brilliant professor, Parker Hastie.

Simultaneously, Bo (without knowing what he is doing) embarks on the hunt by attempting to decode a message in an old family Bible, and Professor Hastie becomes the target of a campaign to destroy his career so sinister and low-minded it might have been orchestrated by Morris Dees, who by now has Thomas Moore fixed in the sights of his character-assassinating rifle.

I shall not do any more to spoil the plot of this engaging thriller, and, if it were only a thriller, I would not be taking the trouble to review it.  If you held your nose and sat through the Nicholas Cage vehicle National Treasure, then you should buy Hunt and see what a ripping yarn can be made on the theme of a search for lost treasure.

Though the rhetoric only occasionally gets in the way of the story, Hunt is as much a piece of political analysis as it is fiction.  To some extent, it can be read as a fictional commentary on Clyde Wilson’s seminal essay, “Republic or Empire?”  It is not “neoconfederates,” agrarians, pro-life protestors, and “Minutemen” in the West who are out of control, but the miniscule political class that puts congressmen and presidents into office and controls their every action—the people who tell Karl Rove what to tell George W. Bush.

If Hunt had been written by the usual neurotic housewife or gun-nut brownshirt, I probably would not have opened the pages.  But Tom Moore has spent most of his life as an impeccable conservative Republican.  A Citadel graduate, a Pentagon official in the Reagan administration, professional staff member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and a former director of defense and foreign-policy studies at the Heritage Foundation, Moore has done his best as a patriotic American to serve his country and to work within the system.  His melancholy conclusions about the state of the Union are the lessons of experience, not the ravings of a disgruntled loner.

Any American who wants to repair the system we have or find a workable substitute will want to read The Hunt for Confederate Gold.

 

[The Hunt for Confederate Gold, by Thomas Moore (Alexandria, VA: Fusilier Books) 318 pp., $17.50]