Master storyteller Erik Larson offers a gripping account of the chaotic months between Lincoln?s election and the Confederacy?s shelling of Sumter ? a period marked by tragic errors and miscommunications, enflamed egos and craven ambitions, personal tragedies and betrayals. Lincoln himself wrote that the trials of these five months were ?so great that, could I have anticipated them, I would not have believed it possible to survive them?. At the heart of this suspense-filled narrative are Major Robert Anderson, Sumter?s commander and a former slave owner sympathetic to the South but loyal to the Union; Edmund Ruffin, a vain and bloodthirsty radical who stirs secessionist ardour at every opportunity; and Mary Boykin Chesnut, wife of a prominent planter, conflicted over both marriage and slavery and seeing parallels between both. In the middle of it all is the overwhelmed Lincoln, battling with his duplicitous Secretary of State, William Seward, as he tries desperately to avert a war that he fears is inevitable ? one that will eventually kill 750,000 Americans.