“We Gave Them Thunder”: Marmaduke’s Raid and the Civil War in Missouri and Arkansas by William Garrett Piston and John C. Rutherford

Abstract

Reviewed by: “We Gave Them Thunder”: Marmaduke’s Raid and the Civil War in Missouri and Arkansas by William Garrett Piston and John C. Rutherford Andrew Fialka “We Gave Them Thunder”: Marmaduke’s Raid and the Civil War in Missouri and Arkansas. By William Garrett Piston and John C. Rutherford. (Springfield: Ozarks Studies Institute of Missouri State University, 2021. Pp. xiv, 343. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 978-1-7346290-1-9; cloth, $39.95, ISBN 978-1-7321222-3-9.) “We Gave Them Thunder”: Marmaduke’s Raid and the Civil War in Missouri and Arkansas is a refreshing take on traditional military history. Grounded in up-to-date secondary literature and straightforward about slavery’s role in causing the Civil War, this monograph brings modern scholarship to its intended audience—“descendants” in Missouri and Arkansas to whom Marmaduke’s Raid still matters (p. 2). William Garrett Piston and John C. Rutherford note how simultaneous events in the western theater, such as the battle of Stones River, overshadowed the raid’s importance and how the larger and better-preserved site of the battle of Wilson’s Creek still dominates Civil War memory in southwest Missouri. The raid has not fared much better in academia—no other monograph-length treatment exists, and the raid receives scant coverage in applicable syntheses, including James M. McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York, 1988), Herman Hattaway and Archer Jones’s How the North Won: A Military History of the Civil War (Urbana, 1983), and Jay Monaghan’s Civil War on the Western Border, 1854–1865 (Boston, 1955). In addition to bringing the raid’s larger story to light, Piston and Rutherford illustrate the logistical chess game played by Union and Confederate commanders attempting to control the St. Louis–Fort Smith corridor—a possible “back door” for Confederates to capture St. Louis and turn the tide in the trans-Mississippi theater—while constantly having their troops siphoned off to larger battlefields in the East (p. 22). Military matters take up the bulk of the book. Piston and Rutherford expertly summarize Missouri’s unique, and often confusing, position both on the American frontier and as a border state. Chapters 1–2 explain Missouri’s multiple governors—the ousted secessionist Claiborne Fox Jackson and provisional Unionist Hamilton Rowan Gamble. They also detail the state’s many fighting forces, including volunteer regiments, which focused on opening the Missouri River to the Union navy and controlling the aforementioned St. Louis–Fort Smith corridor; the Missouri State Militia, a homegrown state security and counterguerrilla force; and the Enrolled Missouri Militia, which called all able-bodied and loyal men into emergency service (without making a particularly good distinction between those who were loyal and disloyal). The narrative peaks in chapters 6 and 8, which offer blow-by-blow accounts of the battles of Springfield and Hartville, complete with corresponding battle maps. Union forces held off fierce attacks in Springfield thanks to hastily constructed fort defenses and a clever use of cavalry units to buy additional time for preparation. In Hartville, outnumbered Union forces again held off Confederate raiders, this time thanks to securing the high ground northwest of the town and utilizing brush to hide their lack of strength. The attention to detail in this book’s presentation makes it particularly enjoyable to read. The maps, created by Jim Coombs, a maps and GIS librarian at Missouri State University, are very helpful. The numerous color images [End Page 367] are vivid and will be appreciated by anyone enthusiastic about material culture. The lack of academic jargon in the prose makes even lengthy tactical passages easy to follow. This is accessible scholarship. “We Gave Them Thunder” has few shortcomings. I took issue with how Piston and Rutherford justify not including more stories of women and children, white or Black. The authors assert that “very few sources detail their experiences” (p. 2). Yet there are nearly three thousand records from Missouri’s Union Provost Marshal Papers for Greene, Webster, and Wright Counties alone (an area that includes Springfield, Hartville, and their connecting road). Civil War historians focused on Missouri have utilized the Provost Marshal Papers to uncover the histories...