Captain Passford had been the master of a ship in former times, though
he had accumulated his vast fortune after he abandoned the sea. His
father was an Englishman, who had come to the United States as a young
man, had married, raised his two sons, and died in the city of New York.
These two sons, Horatio and Homer, were respectively forty-five and
forty years of age. Both of them were married, and each of them had only
a son and a daughter. While Horatio had been remarkably successful in
his pursuit of wealth in the metropolis, he had kept himself clean and
honest, like so many of the wealthy men of the great city. When he
retired from active business, he settled at Bonnydale on the Hudson.
His brother had been less successful as a business-man, and soon
after his marriage to a Northern lady he had purchased a plantation in
Alabama, where both of his children had been born, and where he was a
man of high standing, with wealth enough to maintain his position in
luxury, though his fortune was insignificant compared with that of his
brother.
Between the two brothers and their families the most kindly relations
had always existed; and each made occasional visits to the other, though
the distance which separated them was too great to permit of very
frequent exchanges personally of brotherly love and kindness.
Possibly the fraternal feeling which subsisted between the two brothers
had some influence upon the opinions of Horatio, for to him hostilities
meant making war upon his only brother, whom he cherished as warmly as
if they had not been separated by a distance of over a thousand miles.
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