Overview

When fiddler and farmer Henry Smith and his wife Harriet moved from Michigan to southwest Missouri in 1858, they considered themselves part of a Yankee cultural community whose taste and aspirations were shaped by northern publications and represented by the new Republican Party. By 1861 Vernon County Court Judge Henry Smith no longer called himself a Yankee or Republican, but he hoped his isolated prairie community would remain in the Union. Montevallo’s location at the intersection of roads from Boonville and Lexington south to Carthage and from Springfield to Fort Scott, Kansas, placed the Smith family’s log house in the path of troops fighting to establish Confederate or Union control of Missouri. The Smiths saw neighbor turn against neighbor as they played reluctant host to the succession of Union troops, Confederate soldiers, bushwhackers, and jayhawkers who swarmed past their homestead. Border War: A Yankee Family in Civil War Missouri features the evocative writings of the young couple to illuminate wide-ranging challenges faced by many rural American households in the Civil War era. Throughout the turmoil, the Smiths documented their experiences in diaries, letters, school essays, magazine publications, and petitions. Drawing on archives, family papers, and government records, author Marilyn Ferris Motz pieces together the Smiths’ saga. As the Civil War divided family and community alike and future dreams were abandoned to focus on immediate survival, these personal writings capture what it meant to live during a time of immense uncertainty and mortal danger.

Full Product Details

9781496860057

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Reviews

Motz weaves a narrative that underscores the remarkable trajectory of the Smiths’ lives. There is no comparable book of a northern family relocating to Civil War Missouri."" - Jeremy Neely, author of The Border between Them: Violence and Reconciliation on the Kansas-Missouri Line.

""Motz weaves a narrative that underscores the remarkable trajectory of the Smiths’ lives. There is no comparable book of a northern family relocating to Civil War Missouri."" - Jeremy Neely, author of The Border between Them: Violence and Reconciliation on the Kansas-Missouri Line.

Author Information

Marilyn Ferris Motz is emeritus associate professor and former chair of the Department of Popular Culture at Bowling Green State University. She is author of True Sisterhood: Michigan Women and Their Kin, 1820–1920; coeditor of three books, including Making the American Home: Middle-Class Women and Domestic Material Culture, 1840–1940; and author of articles on nineteenth-century Midwestern diaries, photo albums, and domestic material culture.

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