The story is set in South Carolina immediately after the Revolutionary War. The British have evacuated Charleston and the soldiers are returning to the ruins of their homes. Captain Porgy has to fight off a mortgage foreclosure by an unscrupulous agent. His friends and slaves rally around him and attempt to help him through his difficulties.

The book was written in the 1850s as the Southern answer to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s UNCLE TOM’S CABIN. Porgy’s slaves love him and fight for him. They think that their life under him is great, and they refuse freedom when it is offered to them.

Although containing great characters and quite a bit of action, the book is heavy on dialogue, much of it in the Gullah dialect, and it does tend to bog down in places. It is, however, an interesting piece historically because of the time the story was set in and the time when the book was written.