Mollie Brumley's Civil War

Mollie Brumley, a thirteen-year-old orphan, was living on a farm in the mountainous Ozarks of northwest Arkansas when the Civil War broke out. In a borderland region on the northern periphery of slavery and the western edge of white settlement, her corner of Arkansas saw terrible destruction—but not primarily from fighting between opposing armies. Mollie Brumley’s Civil War was one of guerilla warfare and outlawry, shifting loyalties, betrayals real and imagined, and, for some, death by starvation. In telling Mollie’s story, drawing largely upon her 1901 autobiography, Theodore Catton offers a rare intimate look at the heroism and desperation of war conducted on the home front—all amidst the anything-but-ordinary romantic adventures of an adolescent who lived during an extraordinary time.

In the course of this riveting narrative, Mollie—while still in her teens—falls in love with one Confederate soldier who is lost in battle, marries another who joins the Rebel guerrillas, and leaves the farm to become an army laundress during escalating guerrilla depredations against her home and family. Intertwined with Mollie’s tale is that of Parthenia Hensley, an enslaved young woman living in the same rural community. The story of Parthenia and her white family of enslavers broadens Catton’s portrait of a war-torn community of farmers on the edge of the Slave South. An unprecedented picture of the Civil War in the Trans-Mississippi West, Mollie Brumley’s Civil War is also a remarkable coming-of-age story shaped by the fight against slavery—a fight that Mollie didn’t choose but that finally influenced the person she became and the outcome of her life.

Author Biography

Theodore Catton is a public historian, independent scholar, historical consultant, and faculty affiliate in the Department of History at the University of Montana.