The Ballad of the Fugitive William Parker: A True Tale of Love, Murder, Treason, and Ordinary Folks Who Saved America

A Best Book to Read this Fall According to The Boston Globe and the Los Angeles Times

For fans of Master Slave Husband Wife and Django Unchained comes the extraordinary forgotten story of an event known in its day as "the first shots of the Civil War," from the New York Times bestselling author of Dr. Mütter's Marvels.

The year, 1851. The place, a Quaker farming community turned Underground Railroad stronghold, where a Maryland enslaver had journeyed in pursuit of four men who'd fled his plantation years before. In a few hours, he'd be dead...and twenty-seven men from the village of Christiana would be rounded up and put on trial. Not for his murder, but for treason--for waging war against the United States, at a time when it was a crime against the government to obstruct an enslaver looking to reclaim his "property."

This is story of what happened in Christiana that September morning--and in the ensuing "trial of the century," which saw the president himself advise the prosecution on strategy and a sitting congressman serve as lead attorney for the defense. But The Ballad of the Fugitive William Parker is also a much larger tale, one spanning decades, following a whole startlingly diverse community of abolitionists in their fight to convince their fellow Americans of the subversive idea that now found itself on trial: that the nation ought to live up the ideals it was founded on, and respect all men as equals.

It's a story that whisks readers from the quiet farmlands of Lancaster County--where a self-emancipated man named William Parker, whom legend had it bullets could not kill, rallied his neighbors to ride out each night to battle the slavecatchers who stalked their countryside--to Philadelphia's genteel Society Hill, where socialite Harriet Forten Purvis had the ear of the mayor (and a cellar filled with fugitives). It's stylish, propulsive, intimately human tale of bravery, ingenuity, and hope--and of ordinary people with little in common who came together to stand against injustice...and won.

Author: Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 09/08/2026
Pages: 448
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.33lbs
Size: 9.25h x 6.31w x 1.23d
ISBN: 9781668035931


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 07/13/2026
Booklist 08/01/2026
Kirkus Reviews 08/15/2026

About the Author
Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz is the New York Times bestselling author of Dr. Mütter's Marvels, as well as eight collections of poetry. A seventh generation Pennsylvanian, she lives in Philadelphia with her husband, the novelist Ernest Cline, and their children.