Benjamin Miller, elder statesman and family patriarch, watches the world, the country and the Miller family become more divided. Farmers' daughters are leaving by the thousands to work in textile mills; impoverished Irish immigrants are arriving by tens of thousands and young men head west seeking their fortunes. He worries about the future of his five grandchildren.Elijah Miller, a successful, fourth generation farmer at Riverview Farm, is concerned as young people are leaving Fryeburg and begins a local agricultural fair. He cannot understand how or why his sister can leave.Talented and fiercely independent, Rachel Miller is discontented with life on the farm and living in her mother's shadow. She leaves Fryeburg against her family's wishes to work in a textile mill in Biddeford. There is more in life for Rachel than tending a spinning jenny.Daniel Miller, local sawyer and pious abolitionist, discreetly continues the family mission along the banks of the Saco River. Benjamin sends this quiet grandson to Buffalo to attend the political convention of the Free Soil Party.Ten-year-old Isaac Miller, a generation younger than his siblings, is sometimes overlooked by his busy family. A friendship with an orphan from Ireland teaches him some valuable lessons.Thaddeus Pierce, the precocious only child of Joshua and Abigail Miller Pierce, is a journalist for the New York Post. He covers revolutions in Europe, the Great Hunger of Ireland and the California Gold Rush. However, it is his interview with Karl Marx, the author of The Communist Manifesto which divides the family.