Liza Mundy offers this highly readable, thoroughly reported biography of the charming and self-possessed woman who could become the nation's first African-American First Lady.

At the end of the summer of 1859, twenty-two-year-old Peachy Quinn Harrison went on trial for murder in Springfield, Illinois. Abraham Lincoln, who had been involved in more than three thousand cases -- including more than twenty-five murder trials -- during his two-decades-long career, was hired to defend him. Lincoln's debates with Senator Stephen Douglas the previous fall had gained him a national following, transforming the little-known, self-taught...

An account of the writing of the "Star-Spangled Banner," detailing how Key was actually behind enemy lines at the time seeking release of a captured friend from the British, who would not allow their departure until the bombardment of Baltimore was completed.