I have two sets of great grandparents that came of age in these counties before moving to Arkansas and Oklahoma.
This book is so well matched to my family's old letters and oral histories of our migrating farmers.
The fierce independence, distrust of strangers, and the anesthetized response to turmoil- these attitudes remained for generations and served their survivability even right up to my own father's childhood as his parents made and sold moonshine, while guarding it from outlaws and lawmen alike.
If you like history, then it is a good idea to understand the traditional loyalties as well as the raw facts. I think this book is good at explaining both.
It speaks about how farmers of this day and location were not slave owners, and how they may have sympathized with confederate social motivations of hate, but they would not care to succeed when they their location could amount to a vulnerable "front line", and when they depended on the very opposite for crop sales and for protection from raids and outlaws. I found myself nodding at the book, seeing the deep roots of motivations in several generations of my own family.
Relating with my family's elders always seemed to be so much more complicated than just a "generational divide". This book clearly shows the footprint that raised their own parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. The stakes were so high, and the atrocities were so great. Today's image of the "lawless wild west" makes it look like fun. Ghost towns are tourist attractions and western fiction seems more like western fantasy. So what folks went through and the inhumanity they forced upon each other isn't really well known or acknowledged.
I don't know which of my ancestors held views that supported equality and rights for everybody. I know that they talked about survival- even to the point of obsessing over it. And that topic is a whole lot to compete with when you are growing up with a desire to relate to the rest of the world.
As I read this history of the Lee-Peacock violence, the letters to leaders and enforcements- with estimations of the numbers of criminals, and the newspaper accounts of murder, looting and destruction- I found the clarity and context to to be extremely valuable. I'm very glad that these archives were tapped. This is all very well matched to the footprints that were left on their descendents for generations.
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