The Crisis is an historical novel. It has a eight novel included this book. The novel is set in the years leading up to the first battles of the U. S. Civil War mostly in the divided state of Missouri. Romantic tension develops between the four main characters: one Virginia Carvel, the fashionable daughter of Comyn Carvel a southern gentleman of the old school; another Clarence Maxwell Colfax her never-do-well cousin who becomes a stalwart cavalier in the Southern cause in an effort to win Ginny's approval; the third, Stephen A. Brice an earnest young lawyer from Boston who antagonizes Virginia by his zeal for Abraham Lincoln's cause; and the fourth Eliphalet Hopper a hard-working clerk with ambitions to advance himself both financially and socially. In the end Virginia and the young lawyer find themselves meeting Lincoln together to try to save her cousin's life after Clarence is condemned as a Southern spy and together they experience Lincoln's power to bring about a reconciliation between them just before the national reconciliation which Lincoln proposed between the North and the South would be aborted by John Wilkes Booth's bullet.
