[1] The saga tells the story of the enduring friendship between Orry Main of South Carolina and George Hazard of Pennsylvania, who become best friends while attending the United States Military Academy at West Point but later find themselves and their families on opposite sides of the war.
[1] The slave-owning Mains are rural gentleman planters while the big-city Hazards live by manufacturing and industry, their differences reflecting the real divisions between North and South which ultimately led to war.
Over the next two decades (1842–1861) the men fight in the Mexican–American War, suffer various family conflicts and witness the increasing discord between the North and South regions of the United States.
[1] Orry Main from South Carolina and George Hazard from Pennsylvania meet on their way to the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1842.
A few nights later, Confederate forces under the command of Brigadier General Pierre Gustave Toutant-Beauregard open fire on Fort Sumter, setting off the American Civil War.
Orry (a military advisor to Jefferson Davis) finally marries his star-crossed love Madeline, but he is later killed at the Third Battle of Petersburg by a wounded soldier he tries to help.
[14] The trilogy concludes with 1987's Heaven and Hell, as the Mains and Hazards face more challenges and obstacles while weathering the post-war Reconstruction era.
[3] Set chiefly between 1865 and 1869, the novel follows Orry's cousin Charles Main, a veteran of the Confederate Army who fights in the subsequent wars with the Native Americans and must recover from the trauma of his violent life.
Starring Patrick Swayze as Orry Main and James Read as George Hazard, it remains the seventh-highest rated miniseries in TV history.
[10][11][12] Its sequel, an adaptation of Love and War called North and South: Book II for television, debuted on May 4, 1986, with similar success.
A final installment, Heaven and Hell: North and South Book III, premiered on February 27, 1994, but it failed to match the success of its predecessors.
[citation needed] The miniseries follow the general plot of the novels, although the focus is shifted from the friction between the North and South to the love story between Orry Main and Madeline Fabray LaMotte.
Notable departures from the books are Swayze's Orry surviving through the end of Love and War (only to be murdered by Bent at the beginning of Heaven and Hell), Kirstie Alley's Virgilia Hazard not surviving, Elkanah Bent being a wiry Georgian instead of an obese Ohioan, and Orry Main's older brother Cooper Main being omitted from the first two series.