The Amalgamation Polka

Born in 1844 in bucolic upstate New York, Liberty Fish is the son of fervent abolitionists as well as the grandson of Carolina slaveholders even more dedicated to their cause. Thus follows a childhood filled with fugitive slaves moving through hidden passageways in the house, his Uncle Potter's free-soil adventure stories whose remarkable violence sets the tone of the mounting national crisis, and the inevitable distress that befalls his mother whenever letters arrive from her parents - a conflict that ultimately costs her life and compels Liberty, in the hope of reconciling the familial disunion, to escape first into the cauldron of war and then into a bedlam more disturbing still.