Washington is occupied. The republic has fled north. And for the first time in American history, the enemy controls the seat of power.

The Defiant City is the scorching second volume of An Alternate History of the American Civil War — a riveting alternate history of Confederate occupation, diplomatic crisis, and Lincoln's desperate struggle to hold a fractured nation together from makeshift offices in Baltimore and Philadelphia.

As General Beauregard transforms the Federal city into a symbol of Southern legitimacy, and foreign observers in London and Paris begin to treat the Confederacy as a serious government, Lincoln faces three impossible problems simultaneously: find a general who can fight, convince Europe not to intervene, and keep a demoralized Northern public from accepting peace on Confederate terms.

This is the story no standard Civil War history tells — what happens after the capital falls. The mechanics of occupation, the politics of exile, the terrifying speed with which a government can lose its grip on legitimacy. The Defiant City is a masterclass in alternate geopolitics wrapped inside some of the finest military and political fiction of the genre.