To-day we sought each other’s lives:
Death levels all that now;
For soon before God’s mercy seat
Together we shall bow.
Forgive each other while we may;
Life’s but a weary game,
And, right or wrong, the morning sun
Will find us, dead, the same.“The Dying Soldiers” ~ Anonymous
The American Civil War was the point where the future of America as a country balanced precariously on a pinhead. Ann Rinaldi, a famous historical author, wrote In My Father’s House as the story of the Southern girl who witnessed the first shot and final surrender of the Civil War. But the Civil War wasn’t just fought between the North and the South. The Civil War was found in the home of Will McLean and Virginia Mason in the guise of a stubborn child named Oscie Mason long before the war came. Oscie’s father died when she was a child, and in the beginning of the book, Oscie’s mother, a wealthy widow, remarries a bachelor named Will McLean. Instantly, Oscie is up in arms against her new father. McLean is of a new Southern order, conflicting with Oscie’s own traditional Southern upbringing. Though Oscie’s sisters take far better to their new father, Oscie remains stubbornly independent against Will McLean’s progressive views.
Will McLean brings in a governess from the North for the girls, a Miss Buttonworth. She holds to Northern values that shock the girls but eventually intrigue them, too. Their hometown doesn’t much appreciate this as they already believe McLean is a ‘Southern Yankee’ with his abolitionist views and strange ways. Will McLean’s strange and entirely unknown loyalties stir up division in his family and in the people that know them. Though his first loyalty is to his family, his methods of ensuring survival amidst insanity does not go well over with the traditionalists who believe in an honor and chivalry from long ago – and McLean’s deeds seem like a betrayal to their beliefs, especially as the tensions between the North and the South explode into the first fired shots at Fort Sumter.
As the war begins to affect their lives more and more, Oscie and her sisters learn an entirely new way of life beyond their opulence. Oscie develops a crush on a married officer who comes to dinner at their house, seeing him as the epitome of everything grand and chivalrous the South stood for. This romance is the focal point of a good deal of the story as Oscie slowly matures from an idealistic, headstrong child to an understanding of how the world works. McLean moves the Masons to Appomattox (the site of Lee’s surrender, long after) in order to give the property over to the Confederate soldiers; Oscie has to learn to adapt to a new environment already hostile towards her family because of McLean.
The tension between Oscie Mason and Will McLean and the overall family dynamics of the Masons reveal the grander scheme of the bitter war fought around them. Even Oscie’s strange hostility towards a slave girl and the eventual resolution of that plot point all play into the main theme of this book: everything is never as black or white or as it seems. To Oscie, who grew up rooted in one worldview, anything else seemed like a betrayal of the highest order but as she matured, she began to understand Will McLean and his curious, conflicting beliefs.
Rinaldi’s historical details seep into every bit of the story from Fort Sumter to the Appomattox Court House, as Oscie Mason’s story illustrates the moral dilemmas of the war, especially in the South.