Target : Charleston -- "Stomach for the fight" -- "Men, women, and Rhetts" -- "I mistrust our own people" -- "Prowling about us" -- "The Charleston boy" -- "Build high the shaft!" -- To Charleston, "with three hundred kegs of beer" -- "Screaming like panthers" -- "Fourth of July" -- "I foresee nothing but disaster" -- "They would have been mobbed" -- "Black as charcoal" -- "Do not blink" -- "To set us free" -- "Hunted down" -- The gentleman revolutionary -- Secession Inc. -- "A large and coarse man" -- "Our lives, our fortunes ..." -- "Is it for manly resistance?" -- "God have mercy on my country" -- "Hurra for Lincoln" -- The judge -- "Will not delay cool the ardor?" -- "To arms, citizens!" -- The gospel of secession -- Catch me if you can -- "I have, doubtless, many faults" -- The flight of reason -- "To dare" -- "Wine and rejoicing" -- "Blood must be shed!" -- "City of desolation."

In 1860, Charleston, South Carolina, embodied the combustible spirit of the 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. And so, with Abraham Lincoln's election looming, Charleston's leaders faced a climactic 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 Madness Rules the Hour, Paul Starobin tells the story of how Charleston succumbed to a fever for war and charts the contagion's relentless progress and bizarre turns. In doing so, he examines the wily propagandists, the ambitious politicians, the gentlemen merchants and their wives and daughters, the compliant pastors, and the white workingmen who waged a violent and exuberant revolution in the name of slavery and Southern independence. They devoured the Mercury, the incendiary newspaper run by a fanatical father and son; made holy the deceased John C. Calhoun; and adopted "Le Marseillaise" as a rebellious anthem. Madness Rules the Hour is a portrait of a culture in crisis and an insightful investigation into the folly that fractured the Union and started the Civil War