North and South (trilogy)

• 1. Introduction

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  North and South, John Jakes's first Civil War novel, debuted at No. 12 on The New York Times Best Seller list in 1982. Within four weeks, on the 28th of February, it had reached No. 1. By 2007, ten million copies of all three books in the trilogy remained in print.

  The two families at the center of the story represent opposite poles of mid-nineteenth-century American life. The Mains of South Carolina are slave-owning rice planters. The Hazards of Pennsylvania build their fortune in iron and industry. Their respective sons become best friends before the war that places those two families on opposite sides.

  Publishers Weekly ranked all three novels among the top ten hardcover fiction bestsellers for their respective publication years. All three debuted on The New York Times Best Seller list. A television miniseries based on the first book became the seventh-highest rated miniseries in television history. What draws readers and viewers back is not suspense about which side wins, but the question of how much a friendship can bear.

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• 2. Friends at West Point

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  Orry Main and George Hazard meet in 1842, on their way to the United States Military Academy at West Point. The shared demands of cadet life build a friendship quickly, despite the wide gulf between their backgrounds. The academy does not resolve that gulf; it just puts both men on the same ground long enough to build something lasting.

  A sadistic Ohioan named Elkanah Bent torments both of them throughout their time at the academy. Bent's harassment is relentless, and Orry and George are unable to get him expelled. He returns after each attempt, and his hatred of both men will follow them long after West Point.

  Both men graduate and are commissioned as officers in the United States Army. What the academy gives them is not merely training. It is a shared history they will carry into a war in Mexico that neither of them is prepared for.

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• 3. The Cost of Churubusco

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  George Hazard meets a young Irish woman named Constance during the regiment's march through Texas on the way to Mexico. What begins as a courtship on the road will outlast the war and shape the rest of his life. Orry and George fight together at the Battle of Churubusco in 1847, where Elkanah Bent orders them both on a dangerous mission.

  Orry's arm is badly wounded at Churubusco and later amputated. He is sent home to South Carolina. George stays in Mexico until the death of his father draws him back to Pennsylvania, where he and Constance marry. The two friends eventually reunite and rebuild their friendship as political tensions across the country accelerate.

  Orry's younger sister Brett falls in love with George's younger brother Billy Hazard, weaving the next generation of both families together. Later, Billy attends West Point alongside Orry's cousin Charles Main. They graduate as a pair: Billy into the Corps of Engineers, Charles into the cavalry. A subsequent posting will bring Billy Hazard to within a few miles of the Main family's plantation in South Carolina.

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• 4. Harpers Ferry and Fort Sumter

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  In 1859, Orry Main takes his sister Brett north to visit Billy Hazard in St. Louis, Missouri. On the return train to South Carolina, raiders under John Brown stop them at Harpers Ferry, then part of Virginia. Orry and Brett are released unharmed and continue home.

  One year later, Billy Hazard is posted to Major Robert Anderson's garrison at Fort Sumter, in Charleston, South Carolina. The fort sits only a few miles from the Mains' plantation. Billy and Brett's long romance finally reaches marriage. He receives leave for the ceremony and returns to the fort the following day.

  A few nights after the wedding, Confederate forces under Brigadier General Pierre Gustave Toutant-Beauregard open fire on Fort Sumter. The Civil War begins. Orry Main and George Hazard meet one final time before the war places them on opposite sides. They say their goodbyes, each hoping for the best for the other. Four years of war lie ahead, from 1861 to 1865, and the two families will spend those years on opposite sides.

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• 5. Love and War

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  Orry Main serves the Confederacy as a military advisor to Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederate States. He also finally marries Madeline, a woman whose path to him had been blocked for years. Personal happiness does not last long: he is killed at the Third Battle of Petersburg by a wounded soldier he tries to help.

  Charles Main, Orry's cousin, fights throughout the Civil War as an officer in the Confederate cavalry. Orry's older brother Cooper, whose passion for shipbuilding goes back before the fighting, travels to Britain to procure ships on behalf of the Confederacy. Both the Mains and the Hazards carry losses through four years of conflict.

  Madeline, widowed, faces the Confederate surrender. Cooper Main returns from Britain. Charles, a cavalry veteran, survives the war but carries its damage into whatever comes next. What waits for all of them in the years after 1865 will prove as violent and as disorienting as the war itself.

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• 6. Heaven and Hell

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  Heaven and Hell, the third and final novel in the trilogy, was published in 1987. It follows the two families from 1865 to 1869, through the upheaval of Reconstruction. Charles Main, no longer a cavalry officer, finds himself fighting again, this time in the Army's campaigns against Native Americans on the western frontier.

  Orry's widow Madeline is revealed to be an octoroon, a person of partial African ancestry. That detail makes her a target of the Ku Klux Klan, the white supremacist organization newly established across the Reconstruction-era South. The violence that shaped the Civil War has not ended; it has shifted its form and its targets.

  Elkanah Bent reappears in the story, this time murdering George Hazard's wife Constance and moving to destroy both families entirely. One chapter offers a break: the Main and Hazard families gather at the 1876 Centennial Exposition, briefly at peace. In 1883, the sons of both men enter West Point. By then, Charles Main has become a rancher in Texas and Billy Hazard a land baron in California. By the time Heaven and Hell reached readers in 1987, the first television miniseries had already been watched by millions.

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• 7. The Television Adaptations

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  On the 3rd of November 1985, the first North and South miniseries premiered on ABC as a six-part series. Patrick Swayze played Orry Main and James Read played George Hazard. The production remains the seventh-highest rated miniseries in television history.

  A sequel adapting Love and War aired as North and South: Book II on the 4th of May 1986, with comparable success. A final installment, Heaven and Hell: North and South Book III, arrived on the 27th of February 1994. It did not match the ratings of its predecessors.

  Patrick Swayze's portrayal puts Orry Main's romance with Madeline Fabray LaMotte at the center of the story. The novels build their conflict from the tension between two regional economies; the miniseries leads with the love story between Orry and Madeline.

  Swayze's Orry survives through the Love and War installment; in the books, Orry dies at the Third Battle of Petersburg during the Civil War. Kirstie Alley's Virgilia Hazard, who survives in the novels, does not survive the miniseries. Elkanah Bent is reimagined as a wiry Georgian on screen rather than the obese Ohioan of the novels. Orry's older brother Cooper Main is absent from the first two television adaptations entirely. Heaven and Hell, the final novel, debuted at No. 8 on The New York Times Best Seller list. It eventually rose to No. 2, the same peak Love and War had reached in 1984.

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