American Civil War

The American Civil War is a continuing presence in the novel rather than a distant historical backdrop: its battles, losses, and upheavals shape the families Lizzy Enders encounters and the life she inherits. Through Mr. Enders’s disability and displacement, and Violate Lacey’s account of her son Robert Lacey, the war appears as both a public conflict and a private history that cannot simply be left behind.

Family displacement and its aftermath

The war has already altered Lizzy Enders’s family before the story’s main events begin. Mr. Enders lost an arm at the Battle of Buzzard Roost Gap. After the war, as Lizzy Enders recounts the family story she was told, Sherman's General Order No. 15 took their ruined plantation and assigned it to formerly enslaved people. The Enders family then moved to Independence, Missouri, where Mama’s relatives gave Mr. Enders a job in their mercantile and housed the family. The move brought shelter, but not a restored sense of security or status: Mr. Enders felt cast down because he could no longer provide a home for his family on his own.

That precarious refuge did not last. After a gunman robbed the store, Mr. Enders and Mama decided to go west in search of gold in Colorado. Mama had wanted to remain among her brother, church, and friends in Independence; instead, the war’s consequences were followed by another forced departure. Her death from fever on the Santa Fe Trail makes the family’s westward journey a chain of losses rather than a clean new beginning. For Lizzy Enders, her father’s missing arm is a visible reminder of the conflict, while her father’s sadness and the family’s repeated displacements give that reminder a daily, intimate weight.

Lizzy Enders’s response to Mr. Enders also reflects the long aftermath of loss. She had covered her love for him with anger over leaving Independence and taking her and Mama away. The anger, she recalls, felt safer than other feelings; Uncle William had advised her to keep it if she could keep nothing else. The novel does not make the war the sole cause of their strained relationship, but it places his injury and diminished sense of himself among the burdens that precede their separation.

The war in Violate Lacey’s history

For Violate Lacey, the conflict intersects with an earlier history of domestic violence. In Richmond, Virginia, she endured her first husband’s abuse for years, believing she could not leave without abandoning Robert Lacey. When Robert Lacey was about fifteen, he tried to intervene when his father struck her and was beaten for it. War then changed the circumstances surrounding their escape: Violate Lacey sent for Lieutenant Colonel John Lacey, whom she had met socially, and he helped Robert Lacey leave on a northbound train. He also arranged for Violate Lacey’s first husband’s death to appear to have occurred in a gambling-house brawl. She later went west with John Lacey.

Violate Lacey describes the West as a place where wartime disruption loosened the old social rules. Although John Lacey had not yet become her husband when her first husband died, he cared for her, and she was accepted as his wife. Within six months, she became Mrs. Colonel John Lacey. This new life did not erase the cost of their escape or reunite her with her son. Robert Lacey joined the army without her knowing at first. He feared that, because he was too young, John Lacey would use his influence to have him dismissed. By the time they located him, he had been killed at Ball’s Bluff, Virginia, in the fall of 1861.

Campaigns, burial, and the New Mexico setting

The route by which Robert Lacey’s body reached his mother makes the war’s vast geography part of Violate Lacey’s private grief. John Lacey used his standing as an army officer to have the body exhumed and sent west, a process that took months. At the time, Violate Lacey and John Lacey were at Fort Craig on the Rio Grande. John Lacey rode with Canby’s men against Sibley’s brigade at Valverde in February 1862. The Confederates won and advanced toward Santa Fe; Robert Lacey’s body arrived by wagon on the Santa Fe Trail as Violate Lacey and John Lacey prepared to flee. After the Confederates were defeated at Glorieta Pass, John Lacey was assigned to remain, and they stayed. Robert Lacey was buried in the cemetery where Lizzy Enders later visits his grave.

The novel gives these campaign names a personal measure: they mark where an army moved, but also when a bereaved mother received her son’s body and where she buried him. The cemetery, the gravestone, and the lantern Violate Lacey leaves at night for Robert Lacey connect the distant battlefields to the present. When Lizzy Enders first tells Violate Lacey that Mr. Enders lost an arm in the war, Violate Lacey responds by speaking of Robert Lacey and showing her his grave. The shared fact of war loss opens a relationship between them, though their losses are different: Mr. Enders survived with a permanent injury, while Violate Lacey’s son did not return from the army.

Memory as an inheritance

Violate Lacey’s grief also explains her insistence that the chapel staircase be completed. She gives money to the church because she hopes to redeem Robert Lacey’s soul; she believes that when the staircase is finished, he will be forgiven for killing his father and allowed into heaven. His death at Ball’s Bluff and his earlier killing of his abusive father are thus held together in her memory, not resolved by the war’s military outcome. When she asks Lizzy Enders to promise to stay until the staircase is complete, even if Violate Lacey herself dies, she makes the building project a continuing obligation shaped by a family history of violence and loss.

Violate Lacey’s judgment that the Union may win the war but that nobody wins a war gives the novel’s personal histories their larger frame. In her view, memory keeps both sides hostage. The idea is embodied in the novel’s repeated returns to injuries, departures, graves, and stories told by survivors: military victory does not restore Mr. Enders’s arm, return Robert Lacey to his mother, or undo the choices made under wartime pressure. Memory can preserve love and responsibility, but it can also bind the living to guilt and grief.

Narrative significance

The war’s effects are disclosed across different moments and through different speakers. Lizzy Enders first understands it through family facts—her father’s missing arm, the lost plantation, and the journey from Independence—then hears Violate Lacey’s fuller account of escape, enlistment, battle, and burial. This movement from a child’s partial knowledge to a survivor’s testimony makes the war less a single episode than a history passed between people. The grave and lantern give that history concrete forms in the present, while the staircase turns remembrance into action.

The book’s contextual reflection also places Lizzy Enders’s situation in the wake of the conflict: she arrives in New Mexico after losing her mother, with a father disabled by war, displaced from the plantation, and separated from the familiar life of Independence. The war therefore helps define the world she enters without explaining every danger or loss within it. Its most enduring consequence is the way it shapes what the characters carry forward: injury, bereavement, guilt, and the belief that the past remains active in the lives of the living.