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Based on a true story, this first of a trilogy of Civil War novels chronicles the fateful events of 1861 in western Virginia, as a young man learns to cope with his world turned upside down by war. It is April of 1861. The shocking events at Fort Sumter are having devastating effects on Alexander Swaney, living on his family farm in Pennsylvania just a few miles north of the border with western Virginia. He watches as Virginia fights its own civil war, as the disaffected western counties, long neglected by Richmond, attempt to secede from the rest of the state. Their political struggle produces the first land conflicts of the larger War of the Rebellion, involving the future military giants George McClellan, Stonewall Jackson, and Robert E. Lee fighting in the rugged mountains of western Virginia, soon to be a new state.