1858

From 1840 to 1858 the population of St. Louis increased tenfold as Germans and Irish crowded in among the genteel Southerners, flinty New Englanders, and the equal numbers of free and enslaved African Americans. The country was on the brink of war, and the city, torn between wealthy slaveholders and staunch abolitionists mirrored the great national divide. The richest woman in this city of Victorian propriety was Eliza Haycraft, who could not write her name, but was the proprietor of the most fashionable brothel in the country. After the death of his parents, Fergal Dunne, a young Irish immigrant to St. Louis, is saved from the orphanage, workhouse or worse by a wealthy Unitarian doctor, Henry Graham, as a challenge to prove that the wild race can be "civilized" under the proper tutelage. Fergal tries hard to achieve his sponsor's goals, but finds the life he is offered too sterile for his tastes. When Mr. Tidd, a man who has had some mysterious involvement in Bloody Kansas, arrives as a guest, Fergal finds himself drawn into a plot involving the Haycraft establishment and the Lincoln-Douglass debates about to occur just across the Mississippi. At fifteen, Fergal understands little of these things, but all of them will play a part in his Fate.