Three wealthy plantation widows stood in a courtroom and betrayed their dead friend to save themselves. When Margaret Langden left her fortune to her black foreman, society branded her insane and threw him in chains. Terrified of losing their own forbidden relationships, her closest friends joined the mob. But guilt is a dangerous thing. When the authorities came for their men next, these widows unleashed a scandal that forever changed history.
The summer of 1789 hung over Charleston, South Carolina, like a suffocating shroud. Six years after the Revolutionary War, the Low Country was a place strictly defined by its rigid social hierarchies, vast agricultural wealth, and the brutal institution of slavery. But when Margaret Langden, the 34-year-old widow of Rosewood Plantation, suddenly died of yellow fever, she left behind a document that threatened to tear that delicate social fabric to shreds.
