The Tide Waits for No Woman

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In July of 1860, a rogue wave from a hurricane off the Outer Banks rolled a coastal trading schooner, leaving merchant Captain Clifford Anderson and his crew lost at sea in the Graveyard of the Atlantic. Outwardly rejecting the social expectations surrounding 19th-century widowhood, Clifford’s wife, Abby, agrees to assist her cousins in what they promise will be a low-risk Underground Railroad operation out of Woolwich, Maine. An early October winter storm catches Abby and a fugitive family along the Kennebec River’s upper reaches, and they find themselves snowed in with an Acadian trapper-farmer-lumberjack host and two Abenaki teenagers.

 

The picture of intense abolitionists at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, the Abenakis, the Acadians, and the Quakers is routinely left out of our classroom treatment of the American Civil War. To address that, this story—The Tide Waits for No Woman—reflects fictional characters in historically accurate places, interacting with historical people in political, military, and social contexts.

 

Since the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, very few in the coastal communities dependent on trade believed war was the correct answer to the long-standing problem of international and intrastate slavery. Of course, many shades of gray existed on both sides of the American Tragedy about to unfold. Nobody could claim their hands were clean because of the interlocking economies of the North and South.

 

The ensuing multicultural and multi-racial relationships are for the avid reader of historical fiction who is open to learning new facts about the diversity that existed as the nation moved toward a defining cataclysm—that brought about, at some considerable expense, human suffering and destruction of infrastructure, a more refined view of the Founding Documents.

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