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"Wake me at four o'clock. We're going to see some action." When the guns opened on Fort Sumter across the harbor in April of 1861, two young men, one white and one black, were watching together from the cupola of the big house on the Lawton plantation, which stretched for a full mile along the Ashley River near Charleston, South Carolina. The white man, Wallace Lawton, would shortly be plunged into a protracted, increasingly desperate struggle to retain his inherited domain during war, devastation, and defeat, and to restore it to a semblance of its pre-war prosperity. The black man, Peter Brown, as slave and freedman, would continue a complex and sometimes stormy relationship with Wallace and with the land. How Grand A Flame s the story of three generations of a proud, strong-willed aristocratic family, from the early nineteenth century until the plantation passed from their hands in the 1940s.