One of the most talented and influential American politicians of the nineteenth century, William Pitt Fessenden (1806-1869) helped devise Union grand strategy during the Civil War. A native of Maine and son of a fiery New England abolitionist, he served in the United States Senate as a member of the Whig Party during the Kansas-Nebraska crisis and played a formative role in the development of the Republican Party. In this richly textured and fast-paced biography, Robert J. Cook charts Fessenden's rise to power and probes the potent mix of political ambition and republican ideology which impelled him to seek a place in the U.S. Senate at a time of rising tension between North and South.

Robert J. Cook is a professor of American history at the University of Sussex in Britain. His book, Troubled Commemoration: The American Civil War Centennial, 1961--1965, was a finalist for the Lincoln Prize.