A man of fierce opinions, Englishman Frank Dawson comes to America to fight for the Confederacy in a war he understood as a conflict over states' rights. Drawing on the lives of her own great-grandparents, Roxana Robinson traces how Dawson later becomes a newspaper editor in Charleston, emerging as a voice of the New South. With his wife and two children, he tries to lead a life that adheres to his staunch principles: equal rights, rule of law, and nonviolence, regardless of popular opinion. In the unstable postwar South, however, Dawson will struggle to keep in step with his community, and he will have to face the risk of family disgrace and even violence.