Randolf and Elizabeth Hudson were barely into their teens when they left the persecuted city of Nauvoo with their mother, Mary, and relocated to booming St. Louis. Mary had lost faith in the restored gospel after the deaths of her dear husband and the Prophet Joseph Smith. For the rest of her life, bitterness prevented Mary from ever again speaking of the Church. But now, thirteen years later, civil war looms on the horizon. And as Rand stands by his mother's freshly dug grave, he ponders what the faith he knew as a child might mean for himself and his sister in an increasingly troubled world. Both independent thinkers, their opposition to slavery places the at odds with friends and family alike, and mounting political tension threatens to tear apart their most cherished relationships. As Rand fights to keep the family's steamship business from a hypocritical uncle who has sold out to treacherous slaveholders and secessionists, Elizabeth struggles to end an ill-suited entanglement that could cripple her freedom. Now both must stand with courage as bonds are tested and old wounds re-opened in the midst one of the darkest periods in history, a time when a great nation divides against itself.