Killing Force concludes the Nation of Laws trilogy, a saga recounting the Scott family's rise from ambitious frontier settlers in the new state of Tennessee, to prosperous slave-holding planters, to officials serving at the highest levels of state and federal governments. Whose influence from the third generation will prevail in the national drama set in motion by Tennessee's petition to secede from the Union? Will Jerald's insistence on the rule of law prevent a war but destroy the Union legally? Will his brother Lee's sense of adventure and manifest destiny compel him into battle, and, if so, for which side? Does their brilliant former slave Gamaliel have a plan to destroy both the Union and the Confederacy, or rather to remake them in his blind image?
In a nation of laws, not men, these questions should be answered through civil discourse and jurisprudence in the Supreme Court, rather than in brutal warfare on the battlefield. Why did the United States and the Confederate States of America chose war in 1861? And what would happen if the question were presented anew in the 2020's? Jackson S. Riddle's "extraordinary idea" challenges the Nation to understand its true history and to endeavor in the future to find a lawful and peaceful resolution to its constitutional debates.
