Mary E. Lyons's Letters from a Slave Girl: The Story of Harriet Jacobs (New York: Atheneum, 1992) is based on Jacobs's autobiography and presented as letters she might have written from 1825, at age twelve, until she escaped north in 1842. This is a moving evocation of the tragedies inflicted by slavery.

In F. N. Monjo's The Vicksburg Veteran (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971), twelve-year-old Fred Grant relates what he saw when he accompanied his father, General Grant, on the campaign to capture Vicksburg.

After the Civil War makes an orphan of twelve-year-old Will Page in Carolyn Reeder's Shades of Gray (Camelot, 1992), he's forced to leave his city home and live in the Virginia countryside with an uncle who refused to fight for the Confederacy—a man Will considers to be a traitor and a coward.