America's Longest Siege

In 1863, Union forces surrounded the city of Charleston. Their vise-like grip on the harbor would hold the city hostage for nearly two years, becoming the longest siege in the history of modern warfare. But for almost two centuries prior, a singular ideology forged among the headstrong citizens of Charleston had laid a different sort of siege to a complicit American South—the promulgation of the brutal, deplorable, and immensely profitable institution of slavery. In America’s Longest Siege, Joseph Kelly examines the nation’s long struggle with its “peculiar institution” through the hotly contested debates in the city at the center of the slave trade. Kelly also explores the dissenters who tried—and ultimately failed—to stop the oncoming Civil War.