Millions of immigrants were entering America's heartland. Anti-Catholic bigotry and the seething national divide over slavery were soon to erupt in mob violence. Thousands of religious zealots could be heard chanting at revival meetings in upstate New York. Native people were being forced off ancestral lands.
In this chaotic setting, twenty-year-old Irish immigrant, Aileen O'Malley, came in search of her indentured father and kidnapped younger siblings, stepping into the epicenter of a growing maelstrom of violence along the Erie Canal.
Deeply relieved to have escaped a powerful man intent on forcing her to marry him in Ireland, Aileen falls in love with a vibrant, idealistic abolitionist, Jedidiah, who helps her desperate search for her family, with the odds of finding them dwindling by the day.
They encounter violence, slave-catchers, charlatans, and tragedy. After witnessing an enslaved man and woman taking their own lives to escape re-capture, they commit their souls and energies to the abolitionist movement.
Aileen collaborates with Frederick Douglass on his trip to Ireland, works with Elizabeth Cady-Stanton on women's rights, and becomes a cunning operative with Gerrit Smith and Stephen Meyers on the last leg of escape to Canada via the Underground Railroad.
When she discovers her sister living in a utopian community with unconventional sexual practices, she leads a rescue that ultimately reunites her family and presages the Civil War to come.
Aileen's journey provides a sometimes breathtaking close-up view of the people, places, and events that shaped young America before the Civil War.