Olivia Barrett Covington is Sam Beckett's great-grandmother, and a widowed Southern war bride and Northern sympathizer and helped escaped slaves reach the Union lines near link to The Underground Railroad. She appears in the episode of Quantum Leap titled "The Leap Between the States" in the fifth season of the series. The role of Olivia is played by actress Kate McNeil.
About Olivia[]
Olivia, while she was the owner and heiress of the family cotton plantation, where she also owned several slaves at the time the Civil War broke out, actually deplored slavery, and sympathized with the abolitionist cause; even with this, she looked upon some of the Union soldiers that were pillaging the Virginia town where she lived as "filthy animals". Thus, Sam, who leaps into John Beckett, his great-grandfather, must win the heart of his great-grandmother Olivia, or he may be erased from existence. Sam leaps into John, his great grandfather, in order to help keep alive the sequences which bring about the relationship between John and the twice-widowed war bride Olivia, who wasn't very impressed with John upon their first meeting in her barn, as she says to him (or Sam as John, conversing with hologram Al) "Not only do I have to get a Union soldier, but a crazy one to boot!".
Sam, as John, also has to protect her and John from the wrath of a Conferderate officer, the lecherous Lieutenant Montgomery (Geoffrey Lower) who, in pursuit of John, a Union officer, wounds him in battle, as well as Covington servant slave Issac King, who was secretly, without Olivia's knowledge, was harboring escaped slaves and aiding them in a trek to the North via The Underground Railroad.
Yet, Olivia secretly sympathizes with the cause of escaped slaves who are trying to venture north via The Underground Railroad. Sam, as John, his grandfather, must try to keep intact the relationship which develops between John and Olivia, who, in the original storyline, was to fall in love with John and move North, marry, with Olivia eventually becoming Sam's great grandmother.