Jimmy John is a teenaged plantation slave in North Carolina caught up in the firestorm of the Civil War. He wonders if the promises of President Lincoln will ever have meaning for him as he listens to rumors of General Sherman's army marching through Georgia. Marse says the North will use freed slaves for their own purposes. Then the Union army turns at Savannah into the Carolinas, and he meets Cpl. Charley Hallock, who at 16 ran away from his Connecticut home to join the fight. He's a hardened veteran of four long years of bloody battles, long marches, disease, hunger and thirst, freezing cold and relentless heat, and worst of all, the loss of friends. In the midst of swirling politics and contradictory military action, is this chance meeting a beginning of hope for them both?