The Eulogist by Terry Gamble is an excellent story about an immigrant family who lives in Cincinnati and southern Ohio during a period of great change in the early United States.
Here is a little on the plot from the publisher:
Cheated out of their family estate in Northern Ireland after the Napoleonic Wars, the Givens family arrives in America in 1819. But in coming to this new land, they have lost nearly everything. Making their way west they settle in Cincinnati, a burgeoning town on the banks of the mighty Ohio River whose rise, like the Givenses’ own, will be fashioned by the colliding forces of Jacksonian populism, religious evangelism, industrial capitalism, and the struggle for emancipation.
After losing their mother in childbirth and their father to a riverboat headed for New Orleans, James, Olivia, and Erasmus Givens must fend for themselves. Ambitious James eventually marries into a prosperous family, builds a successful business, and rises in Cincinnati society. Taken by the spirit and wanderlust, Erasmus becomes an itinerant preacher, finding passion and heartbreak as he seeks God. Independent-minded Olivia, seemingly destined for spinsterhood, enters into a surprising partnership and marriage with Silas Orpheus, a local doctor who spurns social mores.
When her husband suddenly dies from an infection, Olivia travels to his family home in Kentucky, where she meets his estranged brother and encounters the horrors of slavery firsthand. After abetting the escape of one slave, Olivia is forced to confront the status of a young woman named Tilly, another slave owned by Olivia’s brother-in-law. When her attempt to help Tilly ends in disaster, Olivia tracks down Erasmus, who has begun smuggling runaways across the river—the borderline between freedom and slavery.
As the years pass, this family of immigrants initially indifferent to slavery will actively work for its end—performing courageous, often dangerous, occasionally foolhardy acts of moral rectitude that will reverberate through their lives for generations to come.
Gamble provides a fascinating look at family dynamics at a time when African Americans were thought to be subservient to whites and women were considered the “lesser” sex. Gamble delicately and masterfully balances the independent thoughts of Olivia with how a woman was viewed in society at the time—without letting our modern ideas intrude into the story.
Not only does Gamble capture the dynamics of women in society, but she also portrays, in realistic terms, the evangelism movement that sweeps the country—the Second Great Awakening. Gamble writes about the revivals and how the traveling evangelists whipped people into a religious fervor that was not cooled for many years.
Finally, but not least, Gamble writes about the brutality of slavery and the untold truth of the number of rapes of slaves by their “masters.” She details the horrors that slave women had to endure not only from sexual abuse, but also witnessing their children and/or husbands being sold.
The Eulogist is an excellent encapsulation of the United States in the early to mid-1800’s.
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