Later in life, he served as an officer of the Confederate States Army including commanded of a cavalry regiment in the Trans-Mississippi Theater of the American Civil War.

As a captain in 1831, he led a company of Virginia militia forces that were dispatched to Southampton County to fight Nat Turner's slave rebellion.

[3] After the war, Borland was elected as a United States Senator to fill the unexpired term of Ambrose Hundley Sevier.

[5] Immediately after his arrival in Managua, Borland called for the U.S. Government to repudiate the Clayton–Bulwer Treaty, and for the American military to support Honduras in the event of a possible war with Great Britain.

He escaped,[1] and was discharged when his regiment was disbanded and mustered out in June, but continued in the army as volunteer aide-de-camp to General William J.

Borland's first wife, Huldah G. Wright (1809–1837), bore him a son Harold who served in the Confederate States Army as a major, assigned to the Eastern Sub-district of Texas of the Trans-Mississippi Department.

In declining health and resenting that embarrassment, Borland resigned from further service to the Confederacy in June, 1862, moving to Dallas County, Arkansas.

[5] In 1843, following his second wife's death, Borland moved to Little Rock, where he founded the Arkansas Banner, which became an influential newspaper in statewide Democratic Party politics.

Three years later, Borland challenged the editor of the rival Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, a Whig newspaper, to a duel due to a slander published against him.