For two sisters growing up surrounded by the Civil War, there is conflict both outside and inside their house.

When a Confederate general threatens to burn Hagerstown, Maryland, unless it pays an exorbitant ransom, twelve-year-old Amelia and her friend find a way to save the town.

It is 1864, the Civil War is moving toward an end. President Lincoln has proclaimed his 'great measure, ' and Southern slaves are slowly gaining their freedom. But for thirteen-year-old Eulinda, a house slave on a Georgia plantation, it is the most difficult time of her life.

In 1863 Pennsylvania, fourteen-year-old Tacy faces the horrors of the Battle of Gettysburg while trying to stay out of the way of her brother David, who is in charge while their father serves as a doctor in the Union army, and to keep her friend Marvelous, a free black, safe from rebel soldiers.

To escape an abusive father and an arranged marriage, fourteen-year-old Sarah, dressed as a boy, leaves her Michigan home to enlist in the Union Army, and becomes a soldier on the battlefields of Virginia as well as a Union spy working in the house of Confederate sympathizer Rose O'Neal Greenhow in Washington, D.C.

Fourteen-year-old Rachel Marsh, an indentured servant in the Boston household of John and Abigail Adams, is caught up in the colonists' unrest that eventually escalates into the massacre of March 5, 1770.