When three score and ten years had passed since
American rebels fought for independence, the
descendants of schism inflamed pilgrims watched
the Revolutionary War’s remaining battle heroes depart this
world in fatigues of bedfast surrender. As the passing of their
heroic founding fathers heightened the patriotism that raged in
America’s electric life flow, it excited an inheritance of sectarian
animus to a fevered, anti-immigration pitch.
Spawned from an affluence of patriotic fervor, nativist street gangs
threaten immigrants across New England as Michael, the toddling
son of an absent, Irish sailor da in antebellum Boston of 1845, is
made a ward of the state when his mam falls ill and blasphemes
herself into asylum. Struggling with a virulent antipathy towards
Ireland’s bitter ‘moral economy’, his incarcerated mam is burdened
to endure maternal loss while, taken in by the surly, elder cook
of a ribaldrous Irish alehouse, Michael works as scullion when
nativists erupt into violence and attack the inn.