By Glenn Rolfe

LAUREL — Moonlighting as an author/publisher sometimes wakens Chris Slavens during the wee hours of the morning.

On Tuesday, he “got up at 4:30 … and typed 10 more pages of the current book, and I will probably do the same thing tonight,” he said.

Employed with Lewes-based Activ Pest Solutions during the day, Mr. Slavens’ night job is as publisher of Bald Cypress Books, which recently announced the release of a new edition, “Military Interference With the Election in Delaware, November 4, 1862.” He describes the tome as an important but rare title last published by the Delaware General Assembly in 1863.

Mr. Slavens founded Bald Cypress Books — named for the grand trees found along the Pocomoke River and Broad Creek drainages — in early 2020. His purpose is to publish books about the history and folklore of the Delmarva Peninsula.

“My career is in pest control. So the writing and publishing is a hobby more than anything,” said Mr. Slavens, a resident of Laurel.

“I’ve always been interested in writing. I have contributed to newspapers in the past. I have blogged since the mid-2000s. I have various blogs that have come and gone. That is always something that I have been interested in.

“The publishing, that is a much more recent development. And really, that came about two or three years ago, when I was working on my first book — actually, my only book that I have personally written so far — ‘The Roofed Graves of Delmarva,’” said Mr. Slavens.

“As I was researching and writing it, I knew that it was going to be such an obscure topic with such a varied, limited focus. It was about grave markers in only a handful of cemeteries in two counties. That is when I looked into self-publishing.”

“The Roofed Graves of Delmarva” was published in February 2020, just before the coronavirus pandemic struck.

“Military Interference” is his first reprint. Mr. Slavens transcribed the original text over the course of several months, working from a scanned copy of the hard-to-find first edition.

The nearly 500-page book contains the sworn testimonies of 128 citizens about politically motivated harassment, assaults, illegal arrests and imprisonments, as well as election tampering, up and down the state, coordinated by a faction of Delaware politicians and enforced by federal troops.

Notable figures interviewed during a two-month investigation include Gov. William H. Ross of Seaford, Gov. William Cannon of Bridgeville and Gov. William Burton of Milford. The proceedings were led by Dr. Gove Saulsbury of Dover, then a state senator who would later serve as governor. The book includes the testimonies of citizens from nearly every town in the state, offering a glimpse of Delaware as a bitterly divided border state during the Civil War.

“This might be the most explosive book ever published in Delaware, yet it is almost completely unknown today,” said Mr. Slavens. “The testimonies within its pages prove beyond a reasonable doubt that there was a conspiracy to throw the election of 1862 and that the rights of numerous Delawareans were violated for political reasons.”

The publisher said several people have asked him if the timing of the release of “Military Interference” had anything to do with the November 2020 election.

“I started transcribing the text back in March 2020, and the fact that I wrapped the project up between late October and early November was an unplanned coincidence,” said Mr. Slavens. “Ironically, Facebook flagged a number of my promotional posts about the book, despite the fact that it is about the election of 1862!”

Born in Scranton, so technically a Pennsylvania native, Mr. Slavens, 32, has resided in the Laurel area since he was about 7 weeks old. He is a graduate of Delmar High School. Mr. Slavens and his wife, Crystal, have been married for about a year-and-a-half.

Mr. Slavens said Bald Cypress Books’ mission is to preserve little slices of Delmarva history and culture in print, “so we’ll consider publishing any manuscript that contains interesting information about the peninsula and its fine residents. Quality of writing is less important than local content; we’re not trying to publish the next great American novel.

“We’re interested in publishing local histories, memoirs, old journals, collections of letters, reprints and genealogical works from the beginning of time through last Tuesday,” he added.

He has other projects in the works as a publisher and author.

“I have a pretty lengthy list of ideas, some of which are more specific than others, and some of which are things I am interested in writing about. Others are titles that I would like to reprint,” Mr. Slavens said. “At the moment, I am working my way through a book about Freeborn Garrettson. He is credited as the first Methodist minister to come into parts of the Delmarva Peninsula, including the Laurel and Salisbury (Maryland) area.

“That is an early book that is kind of hard to find. It has a lot of local place names mentioned in it. It is historically important. That will be the next reprint. I am probably about a third of the way through that,” he said.

“Then, my personal research interest at the moment — well, I have been working on this quite a while, a year or two — the next book that I am writing myself is about the Nanticoke Indians,” Mr. Slavens added.

Hardcover and paperback editions are available through major online retailers, including bookshop.org and Barnes & Noble, or locally online.