Content Warning: The source material discusses sexual assault and violence against women, and it contains historically inaccurate depictions of Indigenous Americans.

The American Revolutionary War is the backdrop of this novel. Brianna, Roger, and Claire come to this novel with a historical perspective of the war and a knowledge that the war will end with the patriots victorious. However, getting to that point proves to be complicated as Claire and Jamie wrestle with political tensions on their land, Roger takes part in the Siege of Savannah, and they all worry that the end won’t come soon enough to keep the young people on Fraser’s Ridge, particularly Jamie and Claire’s grandsons, from fighting.

At the beginning of the novel, the war is waging in the north around New York and New Jersey; therefore, it is distant from Fraser’s Ridge in the Carolinas. However, as the novel progresses, Fraser’s Ridge sees an increase in loyalists living as tenants on Jamie’s land, and their political views inform their actions. Jamie stops Cunningham from receiving guns and likely using them to arm the nearby Cherokees in order to use them in the fight against the patriots. Later, Cunningham makes an attempt to arrest Jamie as a patriot and turn him over to Major Patrick Ferguson, a British soldier coming to the area to build loyalist militia regiments.