The Great Heart of the Republic: St. Louis and the Cultural Civil War by Adam Arenson (review)

In a war between North and South, what role did the West play? Adam Arenson uses this question to provide valuable insights into St. Louis's significance during the Civil War era. Arenson focuses on the "cultural civil war," defined as a "battle of ideas, clashing moral systems, and competing national visions" (2). Unlike the military clash, this was a three-sided struggle among North, South, and West. The book opens with the Great Fire of 1849 that destroyed the central business district and the landmarks of St. Louis' French past. Afterward, civic leaders hoped the rebuilt downtown "would be the setting for St. Louis to make their case for the strengths of the West" (23).

Thomas Hart Benton, a U.S. senator and the city's leading Democrat, sought to fulfill this dream via a transcontinental railroad and the exclusion of slavery from western territory, a position opposed by Democrats in Missouri's slaveholding counties. Benton's plans faltered in 1855, when a bridge on a new western rail line collapsed under the weight of its first train, and the state legislature rejected gradual emancipation. Showing another face of local ambitions, Minister William Greenleaf Elliot founded Washington University with the intention of making it a nationally recognized institution.

Meanwhile, proslavery forces celebrated the Supreme Court's denial of freedom to St. Louis's Dred and Harriet Scott, whose local story Arenson narrates. Despite the ruling, the Scotts' owner freed them, and Benton's moderate antislavery allies won the next elections. Germans, the largest immigrant contingent in the city, strongly supported emancipation and the Union. In 1861, they suppressed local secessionists and defended outspoken antislavery general John C. Frémont in his brief St. Louis tenure. German unionism found visual expression in the public art of Carl Wimar, who depicted St. Louis as the springboard for westward railroads.

Where other scholars have found a contentious battle over secession, Arenson argues for a moderate unionism in wartime St. Louis that tolerated Confederate sympathizers, provided they respected the pro-Union majority. The Western Sanitary Commission, which disavowed the Union label despite remaining loyal to the cause, exemplified this perspective. During Reconstruction, St. Louis voters opposed legal equality for African Americans and supported restoring the rights of ex-Confederates. Consonant with these views, locals supported the Liberal Republican faction that opposed President Ulysses S. Grant. Nonetheless, African American veterans made gains, such as establishing Lincoln University.

In the 1870s, persistent dreams of national prominence spurred eccentric publicist Logan Reavis to lobby for the removal of the federal capital to St. Louis. Despite local support, the plan floundered. Arenson couples the failure of capitol removal with the demise of Radical Reconstruction as defeats for pre-war planning. Similarly, apparent triumphs of the 1870s, such as bridging the Mississippi and building Forest Park, turned sour when the bridge company went bankrupt and the park became a political football for conflict between city and county. These symbolic defeats reflected the fact that St. Louis "no longer [had] any special insight . . . and no solutions to the cultural civil war that still raged" (216).

Arenson sheds light on St. Louis's connections to the Civil War era. The city was home to famous individuals such as Dred Scott and William T. Sherman, and it was the site for critical incidents in the fight over slavery and westward expansion. Readers will also benefit from the diversity of perspectives Arenson considers and his skillful interweaving of the arts and education with political economy.

More contentious is the book's argument for the West as a coequal party in shaping Civil War identity. Arenson reminds historians of Manifest Destiny's influence on the period, but the "western agenda" seems sparse by comparison to free labor and proslavery, ideas that scholars have used to articulate distinctive perspectives on race, religion, gender, economics, and nationality. Arenson...