• General Irvin McDowell is a union general who has to command thousands of men when he has never dealt with more than one hundred men.
• Shem Suggs is in love with horses and always has been. So he enlists in the army to take care of the horses. He ends up riding on a horse in the war whose rider had been killed.
• All of Flora Wheelworth's daughter's husbands are fighting in the war and she feels too idle so she organizes a soldier's friend league for the confederate soldiers. They made shirts and uniforms and other stuff for the soldiers.
• James Dacy is an artist for a newspaper. He was sent to the battle scene to draw pictures of what the war looked like. (He did not show what it looked like when his side was losing and fleeing though.)
• Toby Boyce was eleven years old and wanted more than anything to be in the war and kill a Yankee. He tried to get in the band by playing a fife but he didn't know how. So they lent him a fife and he learned and got in the band. To him it was really boring until they were finally in a fight and he was so scared he ran away.
• Gidion Adams was a Negro who joined the union pretending to be white. He knew how to write and none of the white men did so he wrote letters for them even though they said black people were dumb and couldn't do any thing right. (But Gidion signed the letters of these kinds of people with "Your Wood-headed Jackass" instead of their names.)
• Nathaniel Epp was a photographer who took pictures of soldiers so they could send their pictures to their families but of course he made them pay. One time while taking a picture the man who he was taking a picture of was shot so he got a picture of him falling. He developed it anyway because he felt bad and it ended up making him money because he said it was a picture of a man's spirit leaving him and had people pay a shilling to see it.

Fizzy, age 10