Henrietta's Legacy: A Lifetime of Consequences

We first met Henrietta in 1832 and followed her as she left England to marry a South Carolina cotton broker. We watched her learn to be a proper wife, a mother, a businesswoman, and eventually a widow, handling every conflict through a series of compromises. Now it's 1859. The country stands on the brink of Civil War, and Henrietta is about to learn another important lesson: Every compromise comes with its own set of consequences.Henrietta knows she will never fit into the ranks of Charleston's high society because of her family's commercial activities and her foreign birth. Nevertheless, social mavens will expect her to follow their rules of behavior. She will try to be soft-spoken, uninvolved in political or commercial affairs, and subservient to the male members of her family. She will accept the rules that women should not own property, hold opinions contrary to those of her husband, work outside of the home, vote, or speak in public. Such restrictions grate against Henrietta's English upbringing, but she will break the rules only when she finds a way to do so legally.Motherhood presents Henrietta with a different set of restrictions. Although she was firmly set against allowing her children to be brought up by slaves, she soon learned to rely on trusted servants to care for them and handle their early education. And now that her daughters are grown, she finds herself pushing them to conform to the same social patterns against which she herself struggled. Above all other questions, however, there looms a family secret that could destroy Henrietta's relationship with her daughters. And there is no solution except to perpetuate a lie.Upon the early death of her husband, Henrietta found herself the major stockholder in the family business. She seemed to switch effortlessly from Southern lady to hard-driven businesswoman. In that effort, she now benefits from a booming cotton marketplace. The weather has yielded bumper crops, while cotton buyers, skittishly fearing a wartime slowdown, are eager to pay high prices to stockpile the raw cotton they need for their textile industry. For several years, Henrietta has been able to keep the family business returning high profits without sacrificing her femininity. How long the cotton boom will last, however, is another question she does not want to handle.Henrietta's life is a juggling act. She balances proper widowhood against an undeniable attraction to an eligible bachelor without raising a single society eyebrow. She praises her daughters' independence while hoping they will marry someone who will give them a foothold among Charleston's most prominent families. She can defend the principles of abolition while her household slaves do her bidding. She can fly not just two, but three, flags-the American citizenship she accepted when she married a traveler from abroad, her pride in being a resident of South Carolina and Charleston in particular, and the loyalty she retains for her homeland.The prospect of war, however, changes everything. Henrietta will find that she can no longer maintain that middle-of-the-road position she has held in every aspect of her life. That American flag becomes a symbol, not of proud independence, but of tyranny over her adopted state of South Carolina, and England teeters between supporting the Confederacy or acting to cause its downfall. She must decide whether to engage in blockade-running and smuggling or to act against the economic interests of her own company. As the schemes of espionage spin around her, she must protect one country she loves by betraying another. In her personal life, she must turn her back on a budding romance and protect a cluster of secrets that threaten to destroy her family. No compromise, no hedging of bets, she learns, can solve a problem without imposing a set of consequences.