A fascinating tale of the efforts of two boys (one white, one black) to save the life of a Mississippi black man accused of shooting a white man in the back.

The half century between the end of the Civil War and the Declaration of War in 1917 was quiet only in the general misconception. From the ordinary nineteenth-century American's point of view, it was extraordinarily bloody. There were military expeditions against Indian tribes and against Cuba and the Philippines. There was the general strike of 1877, the cruel failure of the unions, and the ides of immigration and their furious personal energy. There...