Lieutenant Colonel Abner Dowling is adjutant to Colonel Morrell's commanding officer in the Nashville campaign, George Armstrong Custer. As the war ended, he was summoned to Philadelphia, the de facto capital of the United States, along with Custer, whom Democratic President Theodore Roosevelt has just promoted to full general as a reward for his long, faithful, and-in the end-successful service. Custer's headlong aggressiveness found a perfect match with the use of barrels en masse.

In Philadelphia, young Socialist Congresswoman Flora Hamburger has earned the nickname "the conscience of the Congress" for her principled stands on important issues. Her younger brother, David, is also in Philadelphia, at the Pennsylvania Hospital-he lost a leg fighting in Virginia not long before the end of the war. To her dismay, David has become a Democrat and supports a hard line against the CSA. Flora has become friendly with Hosea Blackford, the veteran Socialist congressman from the state of Dakota, who lives in the same block of flats as she does.

Nellie Semphroch, a widow, lives in Washington, D.C., with her grown daughter, Edna. They have run a coffeehouse throughout the Great War in the de jure capital of the United States, which was occupied for two and a half years by Confederate soldiers. Nellie has also gathered information from Confederates in the coffeehouse and passed it on to the cobbler across the street, Hal Jacobs, an important member of a U.S. spy ring. Nellie and Edna were both decorated by President Roosevelt for their services, and Nellie has just accepted a proposal of marriage from Jacobs.

Anne Colleton's former butler, Scipio, has found a job waiting tables in Augusta, Georgia. The cultured, educated Negro is glad to have escaped from the ruin of the Congaree Socialist Republic, and perhaps even gladder to have escaped from his former mistress' vengeance: the Red uprising, of which Scipio had been an unwilling part, had begun at Marshlands with the murder of her brother, Jacob, a fact that helps drive her push for revenge against the Negroes involved.