New Book on the Civil War Border States Traces the Conflict's Impact on Culture, Politics and Self Definition as "Midwest"

Geographic dividing lines - the rivers of Ohio, Mississippi and Missouri - have been and are cultural and political dividing lines as well, and a newly released history by a University of Cincinnati historian traces the Civil War era's continuing impact on the culture and politics of what were known as the border states.

Just published by Oxford University Press, the book,

"The Rivers Ran Backward: The Civil War and the Remaking of the American Middle Border,"

is by Christopher Phillips, professor and head of the University of Cincinnati’s Department of History, who has worked more than 20 years in completing the work. 

Phillips’ book examines the build up to the war, the conflict, and its aftermath in the border states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky and Missouri – western states that remained with the Union but were deeply divided and contributed volunteers to both the Union and Confederacy.

And in these regions, the narrative of freedom in the states north of the Ohio River was just as complicated. For instance, uniformed black soldiers in Cincinnati were targeted by white federal soldiers, who often did not support emancipation or enlistment of African-Americans for military service.

Phillips says the book traces the history of this “middle border” region from 1800 to around 1925, and how the war divided it into the North and South – ultimately creating the Midwest – out of what once was the West.

Regionalism became a way to perpetuate sectional divisions by new cultural understandings. “Ultimately you will find far more evidence of the lingering effects of the Civil War along the Ohio and Missouri rivers than you will if you cross the Mason-Dixon Line,” says Phillips. After the war, residents of states on both sides of the rivers created counter-narratives that obscured the realities of the war in them to fit their cultural politics. The book considers the many ironies in these narratives, and of the war itself, in this border region.

Narrative “interstices” are threaded between the chapters of the book that Phillips says are stand-alone stories, often drawn from rich manuscript collections, about people and events in this region before, during and after the war.

In one of them, Phillips details an event organized by the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars in 1923 in Louisville, Ky., in which the organizations wanted to honor American veterans who served in all wars, including surviving veterans of the Civil War. The veterans were asked to show up in uniform and march together. Men from the Confederate Veterans Home outside Louisville took a train to the event, only to be turned away when union veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic refused to march with them. “And 50 years later, these Union veterans were holding up a flag and essentially saying, ‘More of us fought for this than fought for yours.’ And yet you wouldn’t have known that by the way most Kentuckians portrayed themselves by then. These veterans were sore about the realization that they had lost the cultural politics that ‘southernized’ the understandings of that war.”

A year later in 1924, Phillips says the 351-foot Jefferson Davis birthplace monument was dedicated in Fairview, Ky., and four years later the state’s legislature selected “My Old Kentucky Home,” Stephen Foster’s sentimental “plantation” ballad depicting a slave’s longing for Kentucky, as the state song.  (In yet another irony, Foster, a former Cincinnatian, was inspired to write the song by the antislavery novel, "Uncle Tom’s Cabin," written by another former resident, Harriet Beecher Stowe.)

The legacy of the war was equally complicated above the rivers. Illinois and Indiana had harsh anti-black immigration laws until the end of the Civil War, and Ohio did not initially ratify the Fifteenth Amendment allowing black voting, and rescinded its vote for the Fourteenth Amendment, providing black citizenship. Phillips adds that in the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan had its largest membership in Indiana. “For years, Martinsburg was portrayed as ‘the most racist town in America.’ This is the region where a lot of these ironies are still realized and perpetuated.

The term, ‘Midwest’ was a response to many of the rural dissenters who didn’t fully side with the victorious North, especially over emancipation, or the modern ethos that the victory ushered in.”

“The Midwest was largely a rural ideal, which sought to balance traditionalism with the expansive progressivism of large cities like Chicago,” continues Phillips. “But all of those values associated with small towns and wholesome families obscured the pervasive anti-modernism – including racial antipathy - underneath. Much of the region never reconciled over the war, and especially not over black freedom. I find Cincinnati’s National Underground Railroad Freedom Center and its location on the ‘northern’ shore of the Ohio River an ironic symbol, given the realities of the war in this region.” The war persisted in the form of bitter personal and formal politics based on former war allegiances that were themselves fluid, a reminder that forgetting is as important as remembering in the making of national culture.

Phillips says regional biases stretching back to the Civil War remain in the border region, with Kentucky and Missouri schools boasting mascots with war-borne, cultural names such as Rebels, Cavaliers and Colonels.

North of the river, common team names include the Railsplitters, Generals and Farmers. The divide, Phillips says, also affected the expansion of the Lakota School District in 1997, resulting in Lakota East and Lakota West high schools instead of Lakota North and Lakota South. “The schools are absolutely north and south of each other, but parents in the southern part of the district were not going to be saddled with that name, South.”

The Civil War began in April 1861. Last year, the nation marked the 150th anniversary of the end of the war in April 1865.

Those dates also coincide with the controversy over the construction of the John A. Roebling Suspension Bridge between Cincinnati and Covington, Ky.

“From 1849, Roebling wanted to build that bridge,” says Phillips. “He wanted to outdo the bridge over the Niagara River. Lexington businessmen proposed the bridge because they wanted to connect by railroad to Cincinnati to best Louisville and bypass the river port. Some say Cincinnati’s ferry interests became the fly in the ointment. But the plan was stalled because of politics over slavery in the decade before the Civil War. There were lots of debates here about the possibility that slaves would use the bridge to escape. And so when they actually settled on building the bridge, they wouldn’t line up the streets to make it harder for fugitive slaves to find their way through Cincinnati.”

Phillips says hard times from 1857 also stalled the plan for the bridge, and then the war came just as Roebling had the stone pier foundations put down. By then, Phillips says no one wanted to build the bridge to allow easy invasion from south of the river, so it stalled for the duration of the war.

“The only bridges that crossed the Ohio River south of Wheeling were army pontoon bridges during that war. That suggests that people were beginning to look at each other very differently,” Phillips says.

The book includes an interstice surrounding the so-called Slave House of Illinois. “Slavery existed in Illinois until about 1850. Abraham Lincoln’s involvement in the issue not only included his opposition as a politician, but also as a lawyer in reconciling the fact that Illinois had provided a grandfather clause to the French in the state, allowing them to keep their slaves in perpetuity. But there was also another legal form of bondage known as contract apprenticeship that was supposedly voluntary. It allowed people like John Crenshaw, who was also a conductor on the reverse Underground Railroad – capturing free blacks and selling them as slaves – to transport southern slaves over state lines to work in Illinois. Slaves owned by Kentucky residents were allowed to stay in Illinois as seasonal laborers for several months at a stretch. It was like a visa. Crenshaw was one of those who abused the system, importing slaves and portraying them as voluntary indentured laborers. The attic of his house was effectively a slave prison. The state of Illinois now owns the Crenshaw property, and it is no longer open for tours,” says Phillips.

Phillips also describes the ironic history of the “Corwin Amendment,” named for Thomas Corwin, a Republican United States senator and congressman from Lebanon, Ohio.

“In 1861, just before Lincoln was inaugurated, the nation seemed to be breaking apart over slavery. Corwin was a moderate on this issue as were most white westerners, and he introduced an amendment to the Constitution that basically said, ‘Let’s save the union by reviving the Missouri Compromise line in the western territories and then extend it all the way to California. Everything below that line will be open to slave migration and everything above it will have slavery prohibited.’

“It passed by exactly the number of votes necessary in the House and the Senate,” Phillips continues. “It passed just hours before Lincoln was inaugurated, and Lincoln supported it in his inaugural address. He felt a little uncomfortable about it, but effectively said, ‘If that’s what it takes to reunite the union, then I’m for it.’ Only three states ratified it. The first was Ohio, the second was Maryland and the third was Lincoln’s state of Illinois. No one else did, so it never became an amendment. Here’s the irony. If it had been ratified, it would have been the 13th amendment protecting slavery. Four years later, Lincoln shepherded through the real 13th amendment ending slavery.”

Phillips’ research included delving into special collections at the University of Cincinnati, which holds rare copies of The Colored Citizen, a short-lived newspaper published by African Americans in Cincinnati in the mid-1860s. Additional research was conducted in 25 archives, including the special collections of the University of Kentucky and the National Archives.

Phillips was raised in Sheffield, Illinois, and earned his doctorate from the University of Georgia. He has previously published seven books examining the Civil War era and contributed eight essays to "The New York Times" as part of the newspaper's

"Disunion" series

coinciding with the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, from 2011-2015.