Booknotes: Border War

New Arrival:

• Border War: A Yankee Family in Civil War Missouri by Marilyn Ferris Motz (UP of Mississippi, 2025).

Recent scholarship has emphasized the ways in which so many early to mid-nineteenth century Missourians wished to position themselves as westerners rather than northerners or southerners, but there's little doubt that where they originally came from to some degree continued to shape how they reacted to growing political dissension in the country at large. From the description: "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."

Marilyn Ferris Motz's Border War: A Yankee Family in Civil War Missouri is another volume that embeds its featured firsthand writings into a narrative format rather than presenting them in toto accompanied by editor's notes and text. From the description: "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."

Part I uses the diaries of Henry and Harriet to examine their courtship and prospects for the future. The diaries and letters featured in Part II follow their adaptation to married life, growing political engagement, and decision to make a new life for their family in Montevallo, Missouri.

While Part II covers the path toward Civil War, the diary material highlighted in the third and final part of the volume describes the family's Civil War experiences of being caught in the middle between Union military occupation and mounting guerrilla warfare. More from the description: "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." That war on their doorstep eventually forced them to abandon their home and return to Michigan.

The Smith writings at the heart of Border War "illuminate wide-ranging challenges faced by many rural American households in the Civil War era." "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."