The film is set in colonial Virginia between the 1750s and 1781. Matt Howard (Cary Grant), orphaned son of a backwoods Virginia farmer, uses his connections with his schoolmate Tom Jefferson to get employment as a surveyor and a grant of a thousand acres on the Shenandoah. While surveying the Williamsburg estate of planter Fleetwood Peyton (Cedric Hardwicke) he meets with Peyto...