Gerald McDaniel’s historical novel follows Aindreas Rivers, a thirteen-year-old Irish-Catholic messenger boy navigating 1855 Louisville, a city on edge as the anti-immigrant Know-Nothing Party stirs up mob violence ahead of election day.
Delivering furniture across the city, Aindreas befriends steamboat captains along the Ohio River and a middle-aged enslaved man named Isaac, whose family faces being sold downriver, and works to protect the people he loves as the city erupts into the real 1855 Bloody Monday riots.
Published 2000
293 pages