New York, 1863: a girl who takes nothing on faith, three men in love with her, and the Draft Riots — five days in which the city tore itself apart and the mob hunted black New Yorkers through the streets. Roe was a Presbyterian minister and an army chaplain in the Civil War who turned novelist after the Chicago fire; he outsold every American novelist of his decade, and the riot chapters here are eyewitness history. Fifty-four paintings by Eastman Johnson, Albert Bierstadt and others, spanning 1830 to 1910, carry the wartime and camp scenes that give this novel of the Draft Riots its visual ground.
