The battle of Milroy Station - Robert H Fowler

In March of 1896, Andrew Jackson Mundy, a senator from the Deep South, is secretly urged by Marc Hanna, the manipulative kingmaker, to allow his name to be put forward as McKinley's running mate in the upcoming presidential election. Had Mundy jumped party lines and seized the opportunity, he, not Theodore Roosevelt, would have become President of the United States when McKinley was assassinated. Why then, had he not done so? Thus begins a story that goes back to the Civil War. Mundy, a well-educated young man with a deformed foot, comes under the charismatic, West Point-educated Evan Martin. Martin, a brilliant and ambitious soldier seeking fame and glory, is charged with thwarting a Federal invasion and makes the impressionable Andrew Jackson Mundy his aide-de-camp. At first, Martin seems to achieve tactical and strategic miracles, but all too soon, Mundy becomes an unwilling participant in an atrocity that Martin is able to cover up. It is this secret that prevents Mundy from accepting Hanna's offer in 1896.