Our World; Or, the Slaveholder's Daughter

Our World; Or, the Slaveholder's Daughter is an audacious abolitionist novel written on the eve of the American Civil War, told through the eyes of those who benefited from slavery yet could not ignore its moral poison. Set on a South Carolina plantation along the Ashly River, the narrative inhabits the space between beauty and atrocity, between the gentle rolling hills and the brutal cotton fields where human beings are bought and sold. Franconia, the slaveholder's daughter, must reckon with what it means to love people her father owns, while enslaved women like Clotilda navigate survival, resistance, and the fragile bonds of family torn apart by commerce. The overseer John Ryan embodies the system's raw violence, yet Adams reveals how every character, from master to victim, becomes corrupted by the peculiar institution. Written to pierce Northern complacency and force readers to confront the moral cost of the cotton that clothed America, this novel asks what happens to a family, a society, a soul built on human property.