The Spectre of Death Rode the Land: A Southern Fmily Caught Up in Teh Union Invasion of Missouri 1861 - 1865

John Gordon decrees the family will remain neutral during the Civil War. But Yankee invaders torch mills, cornfields, and homes. Refugees flee south. The farm, society and law disintegrate. Surrender is inevitable, but until then the Gordons struggle to survive.

Living on a sand ridge in the alluvial lands of Southeast Missouri, widower John Gordon and family enjoy a good life raising Berkshire hogs and corn. When civil war drums beat in the east, John decrees the family will remain neutral and go right on farming. Yankee General Lyon claims Missouri for the Union. General Fremont imposes martial law. Gordon sons Stuart and Riley want to honor their father's wishes but they watch from the plow as friends ride off to find General Price. Frustrated, Stuart leaves in the night to join the organizing partisan resistance. Not knowing if he is dead or alive, Riley searches and locates him through his passion, Lorena, a beautiful store clerk in the village of Martinsburg. Yankee generals demand resisters swear allegiance to the Union, leave Missouri or risk death. To protect civilian population, Captain Timothy Reves, a local Baptist preacher, organizes a unit of ill-equipped, outnumbered, independent farmers into a Company of Scouts and Spies, which later becomes a unit in the 15th Missouri Cavalry. The Missouri State Guard dissolves into a Confederate unit and is quickly tagged "guerrilla" by Union troops pouring in from neighboring states. Old men must hide in thickets, risk being hanged or shot. Refugees flee south. Ripley County becomes contested territory. Richmond ignores their cry for help; her hands are full. Missouri must protect herself. Guerrilla activity escalates. Skirmishing is daily routine in this no-man's-land of no-win war. Bent on destruction of southern resistance, Yankee invaders torch mills, cornfields, homes and barns. Farmland slips into briar patches. Family life is shredded. Yankee bosses in St. Louis continue a cry for annihilation of southern blood, but the embattled farmer slips from their grasp, and the struggle continues.

John, Riley, Kate, Emely and Ritty must hold on and wait it out, but daily life is so interwoven with war; the line between honor to the father and duty to country becomes blurred.

Riley disappears, leaving his plow in the ground. Husband Chaucey Tatum abandons Kate. Emely, seventeen, finds her beloved bleeding in the woods, wearing the enemy uniform. Reaching out to help a neighbor woman and her children, unexpectedly courts disaster and further complicates family unity. General Lee surrenders in Virginia, but the war is far from over in Southeast Missouri.