Platte County, Missouri, was the wartime home of Anderson Shipp Truman and his family. In the book’s account, the county’s relative distance from the fighting shaped their experience of the Civil War: while other members of the extended family were driven from their home, the war came close to the Trumans in Platte County only once, through a disturbance at a neighboring farm.

Setting and the Truman Family

Anderson Shipp Truman and his family had moved across the Missouri River to Platte County before the war. Although the county was geographically close to areas caught up in the conflict, the fighting hardly touched it. Anderson, who had signed a loyalty oath, wanted the Union preserved and wished to have no part in violence; he remained on his land and occupied himself with farm work.

The family there included five children: Margaret, Emma, and Mary, and William and John, both too young to fight. Their circumstances differed sharply from those of the Young family, who were forced from their home under a Union removal order and allowed only one wagonload of belongings. Platte County thus anchors a contrast within the extended family’s wartime experience: displacement and devastation in one branch, relative security in another.

The War Comes Near

The conflict’s closest approach came after dark, when Hannah, an enslaved woman at the Truman farm, heard screams and the commotion of horses at an adjoining farm. The family assumed that the Red Legs had arrived. Nancy Tyler Holmes, then in her eighties, fled with the youngest Truman children to hide in a cornfield.

The riders proved to be Confederate cavalry, not the Red Legs. They had come to press the sons of a neighbor into service. The episode brought the threat of the war to the edge of the family’s life without drawing the Trumans themselves into combat; the book identifies it as the nearest the war came to them.

Emancipation and the Family’s Departure

When the war ended in April 1865, Anderson’s household faced the consequences of emancipation. He loaded Hannah, Marge, and their three daughters—five people he had enslaved—into a farm wagon with a month’s supply of food and drove them to Leavenworth, Kansas, the place they had chosen to begin their freedom.

Anderson returned to Leavenworth some years later to find out what had become of them, but nobody there knew. The episode gives Platte County’s wartime setting a boundary as well as a contrast: the county had largely escaped the war’s direct violence, yet the end of the conflict brought a profound change in the lives of people held in bondage within Anderson’s household.