Brother Against Brother; Or, The War on the Border

Brother Against Brother is the first of The Blue and the Gray Army Series, which will include six volumes, though the number is contingent upon the longevity of one, still hale and hearty, who has passed by a couple of years the Scriptural limit of threescore years and ten allotted to human life. In completing the first six books of The Blue and the Gray Series, the author realized that the scenes and events of all these stories related to life in the navy, which gallantly performed its full share in maintaining the integrity of the Union. The six books of The Army and Navy Series, begun in the heat of the struggle thirty years ago, were equally divided between the two arms of the service; and it has been suggested that the equilibrium should be continued in the later volumes.
In the preface of A Victorious Union, the consummation of the terrible strife which the navy had reached in that volume, the author announced his intention to make a beginning of the books which are to form the army division of the series. Soon after he had returned from his sixteenth voyage across the Atlantic, he found himself in excellent condition to resume the pleasurable occupation in which he has been engaged for forty years in this particular field. It seems to him very much like embarking in a new enterprise, though his work consists of an attempt to enliven and diversify the scenes and incidents of an old story which has passed into history, and is forever embalmed as the record of a heroic people, faithfully and bravely represented on hundreds of gory battle-fields, and on the decks of the national navy.
The story opens in one of the Border States, where two Northern families had settled only a few years before the exciting questions which immediately preceded organized hostilities were under discussion. Considerable portions of the State in which they were located were in a condition of violent agitation, and outrages involving wounds and death were perpetrated. The head of one of these two families was a man of stern integrity, earnestly loyal to the Union and the government which was forced into a deadly strife for its very existence. That of the other, influenced quite as much by property considerations as by fixed principles, becomes a Secessionist, fully as earnest as, and far more demonstrative than, his brother on the other side.