Before the archive. Before the feed. Before the myth hardened into machinery-there was only breath and fracture.
In the smoldering wake of American independence, the Whitman family walks the edge of a republic newly born-and already broken. Elias Whitman carries the weight of constitutional compromise in his lungs. His sister Miriam weaves protest into threadwork, her hymns outlawed before they're heard. And a young boy, unnamed until the final page, becomes the vessel for memory the founders tried to edit out.
Ashes of Liberty begins the Whitman saga as a fire not of victory, but reckoning. Where every civic breath costs blood, and every whisper may rewrite the story to come.
This is not a war novel.
It is a novel of what comes after the victory.
And what begins only once the monument cools.