The Rivers Ran Backward: The Civil War and the Remaking of the American Middle Border by Christopher Phillips (review)

In her account of Eliza's escape from Kentucky to Ohio, Harriet Beecher Stowe dramatized the Ohio River as a physical and symbolic border between slavery and freedom. But Stowe's long-term residence in Cincinnati taught her that rivers connect people at least as much as they divide them. She knew about the city's bleak history of racist violence and discrimination and understood locals' personal and commercial ties to the slave states. In the conclusion to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), Stowe urged northerners to confront their own complicity in slavery. Today, however, the mighty Ohio demarcates an apparently fixed regional boundary. Postcards dub Louisville, Kentucky, the gateway to the South, while historical markers on the Ohio's northern bank celebrate the gateways to freedom that fugitive slaves used.

Christopher Phillips's excellent book suggests that this regional split was more a product than a cause of the Civil War, which Abraham Lincoln allegedly attributed to Stowe's novel. Phillips examines Missouri, Kentucky, Illinois, Ohio, and Indiana as a cohesive region knitted together by familial, economic, cultural, and political ties and characterized by white residents' dedication to the Union and white supremacy alike. Before the Civil War, white people in this "middle border" region regarded themselves as westerners and heirs to a tradition of compromise emblematized by statesmen like Henry "Harry of the West" Clay. Though separated into slave and free portions, the middle border states had much in common. The Northwest Ordinance notwithstanding, bound black labor persisted north of the Ohio, particularly in southern Illinois's salt industry, and racial discrimination was pervasive. Eager to develop the region's economy without inflaming political controversy, border whites gravitated toward conservative measures like colonization and assailed free black people and their abolitionist allies. Secession and the outbreak of war initially reinforced the white consensus by provoking ire against Republican crusaders and cotton state fire-eaters. Many border residents hoped for a last-ditch compromise, and some, especially in Kentucky, sought to remain neutral.

But they could not keep the war and its revolutionary consequences at bay. In Missouri and Kentucky, alternate occupations by Confederate and Union troops forced white residents to juggle competing priorities and ultimately to choose sides. Could a proslavery Kentucky Unionist convince Confederates that she was a southerner? When blue-clad Yankees arrived, would it be safe to do so? Across the Ohio, free-state dissenters opposed the Lincoln administration and rejected Republicans' partisan definitions of patriotism. Neighbors turned against each other as shifting loyalties and wartime polarization provoked considerable violence, seen most famously in the guerrilla warfare that ravaged Missouri and Kentucky. Nothing did more to inflame conflict and shatter the western consensus than emancipation. Despite the border states' exemption from the Emancipation Proclamation, the radicalization of the Union war effort—including the enlistment of black soldiers—pushed some proslavery Unionists toward the Confederacy while enabling Republicans to equate loyalty with antislavery politics. On both sides of the Ohio, whites were divided over the propriety and legality of emancipation. But overall, the issue sharpened the emerging North/South binary, "splintering the moderate western consensus and driving a wedge between the middle border's free and slave states" (p. 211). An Indiana steamboat passenger's loudly stated preference for traveling alongside "'niggers'" (black Union soldiers) rather than "'rebels'" (white southern women) clarified the war's impact: racism persisted, but the prewar consensus had been demolished by sectional loyalty politics (p. 265).

Wartime animosities lingered long after 1865 because the region's cultural politics replaced the old consensus. White Missourians and Kentuckians wrote themselves into the history of the Old South and the Confederacy, though most of them had worn the Union blue. White Ohioans, Indianans, and Illinoisans burnished their northern credentials by celebrating the Underground Railroad and contrasting their orderly, progressive communities with the alleged...