Rebecca Harding Davis was born Rebecca Harding on June 24, 1831, at her aunt's home in Washington, Pennsylvania, and soon was taken to the family home in Big Spring, Alabama (later renamed Huntsville), where she would become the oldest of five children. Although they only lived there until Davis was five, Davis later remembered her mother's description of "the mixed magnificence and squalor of the life on the plantations among which we lived; the great one-storied wooden houses built on piles; the pits of mud below them in which pigs wallowed," according to Jan Atteridge Rose in Rebecca Harding Davis.

In 1837, the Hardings moved to Wheeling, West Virginia, a steel-manufacturing town. Wheeling was a prosperous, diverse place, a center for new immigrants looking for work and for those who wanted to migrate farther west. Her experiences in Wheeling would provide characters and incidents that would recur, with little...