Canadian-born Robert Knox Sneden answers the call to quell the rebellion enlisting as a 29-year-old map maker. Captured by "The Gray Ghost" and imprisoned in Andersonville, Sneden secretly documents the Andersonville experience within its walls awaiting parole or death.
Epp McIntosh proudly claims to have once been an office boy for a young upstart country lawyer named Abraham Lincoln. Years later, McIntosh answers Lincoln's call to preserve the Union, serving as a 17-year-old drummer. Eager to "see the elephant", Epp enters the Civil War, is captured in Ackworth, Georgia, and confined at the notorious Andersonville Prison. There, he endures unimaginable horrors and after paroled, survives the worst maritime disaster in American history.
Ill-prepared for the volume of POWs arriving daily and lacking supplies, Andersonville commandant Captain Henry Wirz struggles to effectively run the Georgia stockade where disease, starvation, neglect, and abuse abound within the stockade walls. Inmates suffer inhumane treatment not only from their captors but also from those among their own ranks, a bloodthirsty gang called the Raiders―until the miserable and shocking end.
Vainglorious John Wilkes Booth has plans of his own to balance the scales of the prisoner exchange. Aided by a shadow conspiracy and pushed to the limits of sanity, he commits the most heinous crime of the century assassinating President Lincoln―dividing the Union further still. The nation's largest manhunt tracks Booth and his accomplice David Herold as they attempt to flee their pursuers and avoid the hangman's noose.
Government-chartered Mississippi paddle-wheel boat Sultana is headed north, overloaded with more than 2,000 paroled POWs with Epp McIntosh among the doomed passengers. Cash-strapped Sultana Captain James Cass Mason chose profits over safety accepting a bribe from corrupt Union Colonel Reuben Hatch. The POW's ride home abruptly and explosively ends during the cold dark early hours of April 27, 1865, a few miles north of Memphis.
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