The story traces the formation of a band of Virginia insurgents who seek to free their state from federal control and adjoin it to the independent Southern Confederacy.

The novel is set thirteen years into the future, in 1849, and imagines a world where a tyrannical, corrupt Martin Van Buren, serving his fourth term as president, spearheads a conspiracy to "subdue the spirit"[1] of the Southern United States.

The story traces the formation of a band of Virginia guerilla insurgents who seek to free their state from federal control and adjoin it to the independent Southern Confederacy.

The Confederate edition was also retitled, but to The Partisan Leader: A Novel, and an Apocalypse of the Origin and Struggles of the Southern Confederacy, suggesting that the book was literally prophetic.

[1] Ever since the Southern states actually withdrew from the Union in 1861, the work has been viewed as a window into the development of secessionist thought, and, in some ways, a preview of the American Civil War.