The House of Spotswood

Book Five of the Back Rooms That Shaped America. From February 1861 to May 1865, Richmond's war is shaped as much by corridors as by cannons, with The Spotswood Hotel as the city's nerve center. Behind its parlor doors and service stairs, soldiers, clerks, couriers, and fixers trade in the true currency of a besieged capital: keys, passes, introductions, and silence. As Jefferson Davis and Alexander H. Stephens strain against scarcity and politics, and Robert E. Lee carries the city's defense like a private weight, the hotel quietly sorts who gets heard, who gets fed, who gets moved, and who gets erased. Public speeches happen outside. Inside, survival is negotiated room by room.