In August 1860, no one would have conceived that the upcoming presidential election would unravel the United States of America and precipitate a war between its parts, one that would claim more lives than all its other wars combined. Told through the lens of West Point classmates and graduates, THE PARTING is a fact-based narrative of the impulsive descent of the nation from peace to war from August 1860 to the First Battle of Bull Run, July 1861. It is also the epic love story of West Point cadet John Pelham from Alabama and the beautiful Clara Bolton from Philadelphia, aspiring to be the country's second female doctor and who has never seen a slave. John Pelham is a first-classman (senior) at the Academy and the most popular and gifted man in the Class of 1861. Clara is a senior at Clermont College for Women on Long Island, facing an uphill battle to become a doctor in a profession reserved for men. The story unfolds against the backdrop of West Point and interwoven themes of states' rights, slavery, Democratic and Republican parties, abolitionists of the North, fire-eaters of the South, the election of Abraham Lincoln, the secession of Southern states, the formation of the Confederacy, the resignations of Southern cadets and officers, the posturings intended to avoid war, and the bombardment and surrender of Fort Sumter on April 14, 1861, that dashed all hopes for peace. Juxtaposed against flash-forwards leading to the climactic ending of the First Battle of Bull Run, the story flashes back to West Point to the idyllic time of August 1860, moving forward to the stark reality of war.