Drawing on four generations of family correspondence --reflecting the hopes, fears, desires, frustrations, and failures of an American family touched by personal scandal-- this book presents the saga of the Hammonds of Redcliffe from before the Civil War to after the New Deal. Set in Redcliffe, the plantation home of the Hammonds, this sweeping collection of letters, many of them by women, recaptures a way of life that is gone forever as it provides fascinating insights into the reactions of the participants to disaster on the battlefield and on the homefront and into the agony of an eminent plantation family that had to adjust as best it could to a new social order. More than just the story of one family, the book casts in high relief the whole fabric of society: how all people worked and wept, married and mourned, lived and died.