The point of divergence occurs on April 14, 1865, when John Wilkes Booth's bullet fails to kill Abraham Lincoln, but renders him a vegetable, and incapable of governing the nation. Secretary of State William H. Seward is widely believed to be the true national policy maker. Seward instigates a harsh policy of removing all Southerners who had owned slaves to the western territories in a neo-Trail of Tears, where many of them are left to die of starvation and disease. The brevity of the story, and the limit of its narrative viewpoint to one young girl in a remote province, do not allow this alternate history to be examined in any great depth.