Charleston, South Carolina, embodied the combustible spirit of the antebellum South; no city was more fervently attached to slavery, and no city was seen by the North as a greater threat to the bonds barely holding together the Union. As Paul Starobin relates here, with Abraham Lincoln's 1860 election looming, Charleston's leaders faced a fateful decision: they could submit to abolition, or they could drive South Carolina out of the Union and hope that the rest of the South would follow. In telling the story of how a people succumbed to a fever for war, Starobin examines the wily propagandists, the ambitious politicians, the gentlemen merchants, the compliant pastors, and the white workingmen who started a revolution in the name of slavery and Southern independence.