Raven's Bride

In 1829, Sam Houston was the thirty-six-year-old governor of Tennessee, a “beautiful…imperious giant genius of a man,” whose political horizons seemed limitless. The marriage of this charismatic, ambitious statesman to twenty-year-old Eliza Allen, the daughter of a prominent landholder, seemed to form the perfect social foundation on which Houston would build his glittering career. But just eleven...