Author Josie Olsvig transports the reader to a tumultuous time in American history, the mid-1800s in Charleston, South Carolina, neighboring Beaufort, and the surrounding Sea Islands. As the story unfolds, White aristocratic planters, determined to protect their tremendous wealth and rights as slaveholders, seek to form a separate nation. Walk the halls of the Citadel Military Academy where the sons of secessionists prepare to defend their "way of life" from the invading forces of the North. Listen to the steamy rhetoric of local plantation owners and their spouses under the influence of segregationists John C. Calhoun and newspaper publisher Robert Barnwell Rhett. Climb aboard the Union armada sent to block the flow of military goods from Europe to the Confederacy. Witness the liberation of over ten thousand enslaved workers, who later become known as "contrabands of war," and the Union Army's struggle to protect and assist the now liberated enslaved workers. This riveting historical novel has a compendium of the key players in the war and is filled with previously unknown facts, illustrations, and photographs.