It's 1799. Preacher's son Angel Woolsack flees the life of his itinerant father, falls in with a charismatic highwayman, and settles with his adopted brothers on West Florida's rough frontier. Angel's story moves from the bordellos of Natchez to the Mississippi River plantations where the brutal system of slave labor is creating fantastic wealth along with terrible suffering, and finally to the back rooms of New Orleans among schemers, dreamers, and would-be revolutionaries plotting to break away from the young United States and create a new country under the leadership of the renegade founding father Aaron Burr.