While the Fisk and Burton families are fictional, the situations they find themselves in are not. Because Cincinnati was so close to the South, there were many spies who worked in the area during the Civil War.
The families of men who went to fight in the war struggled to survive. Because soldiers had left their regular jobs, their families didn’t get money from that source. Soldiers weren’t paid much, and often their pay never reached their families. Many women and children went hungry. Cities like Cincinnati hurried to form soup kitchens so that their people wouldn’t starve.
The threatened attack on Cincinnati by Southern troops during the summer of 1862 became known as the Siege of Cincinnati. Businesses were closed, and everyone was asked to help build defenses around the city. For weeks during that summer, people lived with the fear that the city they had worked so hard to build was about to be destroyed.