Christmas Eve of 1860 finds the northern Madden family and their southern relatives preparing for a celebration. Philip Madden, a journalist and sheep farmer, and his wife Mary, along with their three children are entertaining their visiting family, the Ingrams. Cully Ingram, an attorney in Richmond and a plantation owner in Georgia, his wife Claudie, and their daughter have been enjoying the peaceful, snowy evening at Galway Farm in the northern boarder state of Maryland.

The fathers are at odds with each other, knowing that fractious debates in Congress are about to ignite in political strife. They try for their families’ sakes to keep their opinions to themselves yet the adults finally explode in a shouting argument of ideological differences.

The Madden family’s perilous journey and experiences over the next four years are many: slavery, states’ rights, battlefields, Civil War nursing, Union Hospital, Clara Barton, Dorothea Dix, and Louisa May Alcott, journalism, Antietam, Shiloh and Gettysburg, battlefield photographer Mathew Brady, and finally, Appomattox and Ford’s Theatre in Washington.

It is December 24, 1860…their conflicts begin.