Beat the Drum for Justice

A young lawyer witnesses the horrors of slavery and war in Cross’ debut historical novel.

In 1853 Georgetown, Ohio, Gabriel Adams and his family are conductors on the Underground Railroad. Gabe’s father, the Reverend Atticus Adams, is a prominent abolitionist, and their home near the Kentucky border makes it easy for 14-year-old Gabe to help fugitive slaves escape to freedom. Even in a free state like Ohio, it is illegal to help the runaways, but Gabe and his parents risk their own freedom in pursuit of the noble cause. It is through these activities that he meets Jasmine, a young escaped slave whose family passes through the Adams farm. The two carry on a correspondence—Jasmine writing from Canada, Gabe from Ohio—as Gabe grows up, studies law, and becomes more deeply involved in the cause of abolition. (Though he misses John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, Gabe defends the man during his subsequent trial.) He fights for the Union during the Civil War, marches with Sherman to the sea, and, along the way, crosses paths with the likes of Frederick Douglass, Ulysses S. Grant, and Abraham Lincoln. After the war, he’s reunited with Jasmine, but the promises of emancipation and equal rights for Black Americans prove to be temporary illusions as the Reconstruction gives way to Jim Crow. (“There was a righteous hope for healing with Reconstruction,” fumes Gabe late in the novel, “but with Reconstruction dead, inequality and the Negro problem will continue for a long time.”) Cross’ prose is direct and accessible. He does not use the time period as the backdrop for a historical romance; rather, the politics, racism, and violence of the time are his subject, and he tosses his characters mercilessly into the scrum. The book is long at nearly 600 pages, and some elements of the narrative lean toward the sentimental, but readers will appreciate Gabe’s lawyerly perspective on the injustice of slavery as well as the stridency of his moral outrage.

An engaging, legal-minded novel about the scourge of bondage and racism.