In 1850, America is ten years away from bloody conflagration. War with Mexico has been won. Now a war from within is being waged. The North wants to put a halt to the expansion of slavery into the new territories, from Texas to California. The South will take up arms to defend its ‘peculiar institution.’ Compromise is the word of the day, but is it possible?

In 1850, Zachary Taylor is President of  the United States. Though a native Virginian and slave owner, he has served in the military for over three decades and will fight to the death to uphold union. Despite being the general who defeated the Mexicans at Monterrey, the hero of the war with Mexico, he is mistrusted by North and South. For him, compromise is out of the question. Not so for his vice president. In the halls of congress and on the dusty, muddy streets of Washington City, whispers abound, the muttering of angry people who would just as soon see Ol’ Rough and Ready out of the way. He’s old. He’s out of touch. He’s stubborn and a danger to the peace and harmony of the land.

Ligeia Taylor, twenty-eight years old, and born into slavery, adores her master, the twelfth president of the United States. A loner among the slaves brought from Louisiana to the White House, she longs for freedom with every breath she takes and every page of every book she reads. Ligeia is self-taught. Not only can she read, but she can write. And through her friendship with the mulatto engineer Martineau, she sends her poems to local men of letters in the desperate hope that one day she will earn her freedom through publication of her verses. Her favorite author is Edgar Allan Poe whose despair and grim outlook on life resonates with Ligeia. Both in their own ways are desperate for redemption.

Never has there been such a love story between two such different individuals. The one a slave, who has lost her only child and been disfigured by the wife of her first master. The other a renowned author destined for an untimely end. When Taylor dies of a sudden illness, the two, Ligeia and Poe, are brought together by the force of Ligeia’s beliefs. She doesn’t know that Poe has himself died, months before, and is appearing to her now as a lonely spirit who can only be seen by those who know slavery of the soul. He is her guide, her mentor, and she the only thing between him and purgatory.

At a time when the greatest men of American history dominate — Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, Jefferson Davis,  Stephen Douglass — it is a slave and a drunkard who find resolution, a man and a woman who find the meaning of true love.