A particular focus is the challenge of reconciling individual rights and liberties with preserving the nation when its existence is threatened (a topic Safire would return to in his non-fiction writing, following the September 11 attacks).

When the Senate adjourns, his good friend John Weiss Forney warns him that "you will follow your doctrine into the Confederate army," and in the end this is what happens.

Book Three shows Edwin M Stanton succeeding Simon Cameron as Secretary of War with the support of General McClellan, whom he secretly intends to depose.

(Later in the book McClellan bitterly complains that Stanton is "the most unmitigated scoundrel I ever knew, heard of, or read of," and compares him unfavorably to Judas Iscariot.)

It shows how by both sides come to accept the doctrine that the goal of war is the destruction of the enemy's forces; Confederate commander Albert Sidney Johnson tells Breckinridge frankly, "We deal in death."

He is portrayed as torn between his duty to do his utmost against the enemy and his desire to win the war in such a way as will induce the Southern states to return to the Union voluntarily, with slavery intact.

The purpose of making these two fictional connections is to provide a prism through which to examine their characters and a hatrack on which to hang other information, as well as to entertain the fact-laden reader and author.

[3] Freedom was the subject of a lengthy review in Commentary by James W. Tuttleton[3] and of a scholarly article by DC Hammer in the Journal of Popular Culture.