In 1833, a wild, imposing man named Thomas Sutpen comes to Jefferson, Mississippi, with a group of slaves and a French architect in tow. He buys a hundred square miles of land from an Indian tribe, raises a manor house, plants cotton, and marries the daughter of a local merchant, and within a few years is entrenched among the local aristocracy. Sutpen has a son and a daughter, Henry and Judith, who grow up in a life of uncultivated ease in the northern Mississippi countryside. Henry goes to college at the University of Mississippi in 1859, and meets a sophisticated fellow student named Charles Bon, whom he befriends and brings home for Christmas. Charles meets Judith, and over time, an engagement between them is assumed. But Sutpen realizes that Bon is actually his own son--Henry and Judith's half-brother--from a previous marriage which he abandoned when he discovered that his wife had negro blood. He tells Henry that the engagement cannot be, and that Bon is Henry's own brother; Henry reacts with outrage, refusing to believe that Bon knew all along and willingly became engaged to his own sister. Henry repudiates his birthright, and he and Bon flee to New Orleans. When war breaks out, they enlist, and spend four hard years fighting for the Confederacy as the South crumbles around them. At the end of the war, Sutpen (a colonel) finds his son and reveals to him that not only is Bon his and Judith's half-brother, he is also, in part, a black man.