In 1866, U.S. President Winfield Scott (pictured) dies, two weeks short of his eightieth birthday, having served in the White House longer than any of his predecessors. Scott's presidency has spanned a turbulent period in American history, beginning in the middle of the U.S.-British war of 1837-'39 and extending through the western expansion which in the 1830s and 1840s brought the USA into conflict with Mexico and the growing sectional strife over the issue of slavery.

President Winfield Scott makes way for an older man by Eric LippsIncredibly, the man who will take his place is even older. Vice-President William Henry Harrison, the compromise candidate selected by Congress as Scott's No. 2 in the brokered election of 1837, is now 93 years old, having been born just before the start of the American Revolution. Yet under the terms of the Constitution, Harrison will serve as acting President until Congress can choose a new lifetime successor to Scott.

And Harrison is not well. Confined to a wheelchair for the past two years, he has grown increasingly forgetful and erratic, prone to outbursts of temper and wild accusations that "enemies of the nation" are plotting against him.

Unfortunately, he is not altogether incorrect. President Scott had managed to hold the United States together despite the growing strife between North and South, but the nation is seething with political conspiracies, both pro-and anti-slavery. The Knights of the Golden Circle, a shadowy group organized in 1860, is rumored to be amassing arms for an attempt at establishing a breakaway Southern confederacy dedicated to slavery, while in the Southwest, Spanish-speaking militants are actively calling for the territories taken from Mexico in years past to rejoin that nation.