The Balloonists of the Peninsula
A Novel of the Union's First Air Force

About this book:

When the first shot at Fort Sumter shattered Professor Thaddeus Lowe's dream of crossing the Atlantic by balloon, the aeronaut turned his silk leviathan toward a far more dangerous frontier: the Peninsular Campaign. With a volatile mix of hydrogen, varnished silk, and sheer audacity, Lowe fights to convince a skeptical Union high command that the sky is not a spectacle—it is the ultimate high ground. From the mud of Fortress Monroe to the smoke-choked heights above Seven Pines, he and his ragtag crew of telegraphists and mechanics wage a private war against Confederate sharpshooters, tempestuous winds, and generals who measure progress in blood rather than altitude.

History remembers the ironclads and the railroads; it forgets the men who stitched the sky into a telegraph wire. *The Balloonists of the Peninsula* plunges you into the open wicker basket of the *Intrepid* as Lowe duels rival aeronaut John Wise, spars with the imperious George McClellan, and sends the first aerial dispatch ever read by a sitting president—Abraham Lincoln, watching from the White House portico as the future hovers five hundred feet above the National Mall. Every chapter crackles with the smell of sulfuric acid, the snap of hemp rigging, and the terse click of a Morse key translating the enemy's secrets into victory.

Meticulously researched and propelled by the pulse of a techno-thriller, this is the untold story of the Union's first air force: a handful of visionaries who turned cotton and gas into the eyes of an army, proving that the most revolutionary weapon of the Civil War carried no gun at all. Strap in—the ascent begins now.