"Free Joe"
Joe, “the humblest, the simplest, and the most serious of all God's living creatures,” is a slave given his freedom by his master as his last act before committing suicide following a night of poker which cost him everything but Joe. “Free Joe” as he comes to be known is suddenly trapped in a strange limbo in which he is accepted neither by the free white society nor the enslaved black society.
"Little Compton"
Compton is a business from the North who establishes a friendship with a prominent Georgia man named Walthall in the years before the Civil War. Tensions arising from the growling likelihood of that conflict stimulate Compton to flee in fear of being targeted for holding Union sympathies. He and Walthall will later reunited in uniform on opposite sides at the battle of Gettysburg.
Ferris Trunion, “Aunt Fountain’s Prisoner”
Ferris Trunion is “a wholesome man, a man full of honest affection, hearty laughter, and hard work” from the North who invests in the Tomlinson Place plantation following hard times brought on as a result of the Civil War. He represents the North in the story’s (and collection’s) theme of post-war reconciliation while the daughter of the plantation owners that he eventually marries is the symbol of the South.
Harriet Bledsoe Tomlinson, “Aunt Fountain’s Prisoner”
Trunion’s eventual mother-in-law, on the other hand, is a character that represents the ill-feeling still lingering that creates conflict in the attempt to reconcile North and South. Although Mrs. Tomlinson accepts Ferris as her daughter’s husband, she views his aggressive business sense with contempt that does not fully soften.
Mr. Chichester, “Trouble on Lost Mountain”
Chichester is an “agent of a company of Boston capitalists who were anxious to invest money in Georgia marble quarries.” He comes to Lost Mountain and immediately establishes an unexpected rapport with a mountain man he’s been told “in many respects, is the best man in the county,” Abe Hightower.
Babe Hightower, “Trouble on Lost Mountain”
Babe is Abe’s shy, but pretty young daughter who is being pursued by a young man that also comes Lost Mountain home, Tuck Peevy. When Tuck becomes jealous and angered by the idea of looking for a life beyond the mountain thanks to the arrival of Chichester, the story becomes the collection’s only one with a tragic ending coming into conflict with the theme of reconciliation between North and South.
Helen Osborne Eustis, “Azalia”
Miss Helen Osborne Eustis of Boston is the daughter of Charles Osborne Eustis, noted abolitionist. Her doctor recommends a trip to “nature's own sanitarium, the pine woods of Georgia” to improve her health and it is while in Georgia that she becomes the last tool of reconciliation on the part of the North in the volume.
General Peyton Garwood “Azalia”
The South in this tale of reconciliation is represented by a former Confederate general whose view of slavery could not differ much from that of Helen’s much-admired father. Garwood’s view on slavery can be summed in his confident assertion that evidence has affirmatively proven “Providence had a hand in the whole unfortunate business."
