Loyalty on the Frontier

A RARE CONTEMPORARY ACCOUNT OF THE PLIGHT AND PATRIOTISM OF SOUTHERN UNIONISTS. Loyalty on the Frontier was first published in 1863 and has the immediacy, passion, and intimacy of its wartime context. Albert Webb Bishop was a New York attorney who joined the Union Army at the start of the Civil War. In 1862, he accepted a commission as lieutenant colonel in a regiment of Ozark mountaineers. While maintaining Union control of northwest Arkansas, Bishop gathered stories of political secession, social coercion, and the brutal terrorism that marked this region. He compiled them into this heroic tale about the triumph of Unionism in a Confederate state, a history meant to inspire citizens everywhere. He wrote to boost Union morale, to elicit sympathy for the South's Unionists, and to identify both loyal and disloyal residents of Arkansas for postwar reward and retribution. To these ends, his volume includes biographies of prominent local Unionists: and it describes the activities of his regiment, his tenure as provost marshal in Fayetteville, and the course of the war in Arkansas up to the spring of 1863. This new, edited version of his text includes a detailed biographical essay on Bishop himself and, for the first time, annotations to identify the cast of characters and to provide interpretive background.