Publisher's Synopsis
Moonroy was the plantation of Peter Monclair, his wife and his four children and his slaves, since any colonial plantation was a biracial community, even though Jefferson stated such could not exist. Moonroy, founded by Peter's father, a French Huguenot and one-time pirate, was not one of the grand river plantations of South Carolina, but it was a prosperous one, the year 1760 being one of the best so far for most planters. But clouds were gathering on the horizon. Peter was an early signer in 1764 protesting the Stamp Act under Gadsden's Liberty Tree while his teen-age son went along on a more direct protest one dark night. Peter and his friends, like Henry Laurens, like so many of Carolina's citizens, came to realize that reason and law would not change England's policies. Change would come only through war. In South Carolina after ten years of growing rebellion, the war itself began June 28, 1776, when 11 British warships attacked CharlesTown and every able-bodied Patriot was defending the city, rifle in hand, including Peter. That was the first of three attacks between 1776 and 1780 followed by a brutal two years of British occupation, years that changed everyone's life. But a story about Moonroy during the years of war is not just about the Monclairs and their four children, but also about Patience and her son, both born in Barbados, and about Jeremy, a Gambia man and the woman of the happy, heart-shaped Fulani face who caught his eye, and tall Caesar who caught many a woman's eye, and sullen Hambro whose father had been a lion hunter and Old Turner who had sailed the seas with the old pirate himself, and many others, for the war touched everyone's life. And because the war was about freedom, the issue of freeing the slaves was a part of the discussion.
