Rebels on the Border: Civil War, Emancipation, and the Reconstruction of Kentucky and Missouri by Aaron Astor (review)

Despite the fact that Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware all remained, somewhat miraculously, within the grasp of the Union, these states were likely the most bitterly divided of the American Civil War—gray spaces where irregular violence and political dissent were endemic. As a result, military historians of the era have long maintained an uneasy relationship with the so-called borderlands; their influence (if any) on the overall outcome of the war has been the subject of constant debate and has consumed the vast majority of attention paid to them. Fortunately, though, a string of increasingly perceptive studies of border-state slavery, memory, and identity have emerged from the last decade with due acclaim. Historians like Brian McKnight, Amy Murrell Taylor, Christopher Phillips, and especially Anne Marshall have decisively underscored the importance of the war(s) on the border(s) to a broader national epic of rebellion, death, and rebirth. And for intricately chronicling the downfall of conservative unionism and the retroactive rise of Confederate ideology in the Bluegrass Region of Kentucky and the riverine stretch of Missouri known as Little Dixie, Aaron Astor’s Rebels on the Border is a well-written—though sometimes belaboring—addition to this new wave.

According to Astor, Kentucky and Missouri, as illustrated by his Bluegrass and Little Dixie case samples, combined to represent the last great stronghold of conservative unionists. These white Missourians and Kentuckians—many of them farmers and small-scale slaveholders—scoffed at southern fire-eaters and northern radicals with equal vigor. As Astor observes, they were determined to preserve the institution of slavery and the racial hierarchy it pillared, but believed that loyalty to the Union was the surest means to that end. This “moderate” position rapidly became untenable as Lincoln sought to coerce the Confederate states back into the Union; as the guerrilla war in both states, but especially in Missouri, spiraled out of control; and, perhaps most important, as enslaved African Americans accelerated their plans for resistance and increasingly ran away to freedom.

As conservative unionists had chosen not to secede from the Union to protect slavery, Astor rightfully contends that they were horrified by the linkage of unionism and emancipation both during and after the war. For small-scale slaveholders and even for white Missourians and Kentuckians who owned no slaves at all, the institution of slavery had functioned as a tool for social engineering that kept black laborers manacled to their inferior stations in life. Thus, the more former unionists perceived that the Civil War was being transformed into a northern crusade for emancipation and black equality, the more that Missourians and Kentuckians saw the superiority of their whiteness in jeopardy and turned to the white supremacist mythology of the Lost Cause to rehabilitate and redeem it, argues Astor. On the level of constructing this cause-and-effect dynamic, Astor is quite successful. The book provides a durable explanation for postwar political and cultural developments in Kentucky and Missouri rooted in their antebellum ideologies. Moreover, Rebels on the Border also infuses a much-needed African American perspective into the story of the more westerly border states.

These successes withstanding, Rebels on the Border is also bedeviled by fundamental methodological questions. From the outset, Astor diligently notes the antebellum social, economic, and genealogical bonds from which he later extrapolates when, how, and why Kentucky and Missouri each abandoned conservative unionism in favor of a Confederate identity in the postwar period. But in the process of highlighting these pre- and postwar likenesses, the book also curtails much of what made the wartime experiences of Kentuckians and Missourians very different. This is especially problematic when considering the degree to which residents of Little Dixie and the Bluegrass Region were touched by variant brands of guerrilla warfare and interactions with neighboring states. Combined with issues of broader representativeness stemming from...