Alfred Mordecai was a brilliant young officer in the United States Army when the crisis which led to the Civil War began. Son of a famous school master in North Carolina, Alfred had graduated with honors from West Point and became a professor there. He was an American military observer in the Crimean War, and after the outbreak of the War of 1848, at great personal danger, he investigated a scandal in Mexico on behalf of the United States War Department. These achievements and others had gained him the reputation of one of the most promising officers in the United States Army.

Having married a Philadelphia girl, whose sympathies were with the North, and having become father of a son who was a cadet at West Point at the outbreak of the Civil War, Major Mordecai, like so many other Americans of his day, was torn berween loyalties to the state of his birth and to his own family and to his wife's family and his own children and their friends. How he faced the dilemma created by the outbreak of the war is the theme of this true story of an American Jewish hero. Young people will find exciting and inspiring reading in this story of a great American who had to make an uncommon decision and who faced it with character and integrity. They will find also a moving account of the relations among grandfather, father and son.

From the dust jacket