The year is 1890, the place, the House of Representatives in Washington where progressive Speaker Thomas B. Reed presides over a Congress in which the dying embers of the Civil War flare up again as he confronts Southern White Supremacists in his determination to end their power. Here is a story of wartime grudges and religious dilemma; of murder,romance, passions personal and political, told as a novel against the bacground of Washington's marbled halls, desperate alley slums, elegant whorehouses, and spittoon-filled poolrooms along Pennsylvania Avenue, and in the small towns and remote farms of the deep South where Winchester-carrying night-riders maintain white supremacy by relentless lynchings, murders and violence.
