When General William Tecumseh Sherman asks his old friend Frederick Douglass Macdonald to write to the widow of President Lincoln describing his service as a colored soldier in the army, Macdonald produces more than just letters. His correspondence and journal entries open a window onto an unseen side of the Underground Railroad and the Civil War. Son of a fugitive slave who escaped to British Canada, Macdonald was trained as a journalist and became friends with Mary Ann Shadd and John Brown before turning his back on a promising career and safe life to join the Union cause. As a spy in Atlanta and invaluable intelligence agent on Sherman's March to the Sea, he finds himself working directly for the General and is soon embroiled in events that no one could predict. Even after the war is won it isn't finished with Macdonald. He has no reason to expect the looming tragedy brought on by his wife's own Civil War secrets.