Remembrance: Andrew R. L. Cayton: Midwesterner, 1954–2015

Last spring, at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the historian Andrew R. L. Cayton participated in a panel discussion at the first annual history conference of the newly organized Midwestern History Association. Cayton held forth on the future of the field of midwestern studies, which he had done so much to lead for over two decades. He offered smart advice, gentle reminders, historical perspective, important warnings, and some grand plans. Little did the assembled participants know that Drew, as he was widely known, would soon be diagnosed with colon cancer and that his Michigan remarks would be one of the final times he would offer his thoughts on the Midwest and its history.

Drew was about as midwestern as it was possible to be. Born in Cincinnati, he mostly grew up in Marietta, Ohio, where the Muskingum River drains into the Ohio River, which forms the southern boundary of the Midwest. Marietta was the first town established in the Northwest Territory by the Americans after the revolution forced the British to cede the future Midwest to its rebellious colony. Drew’s father was head of the library at Marietta College and his mother taught art at the local high school. Although he took an expansive view of midwestern history and the various histories contained therein, including the darker stories, Drew recalled his youth in Marietta with great fondness and said he believed “strongly in the basic values associated with that world: family, respectability, mutual respect, and integrity, what my mother used to call character.”

After graduating from high school in Marietta in 1972, Drew went to the University of Virginia, where he earned his ba in 1976. At Virginia, he decided to pursue academic history instead of becoming a high school teacher because he read Ray Allen Billington’s biography of Frederick Jackson Turner. He also met Mary Kupiec during his second year of college at Virginia and they were married in August 1975. Later followed his daughter Elizabeth Renanne, who was born in November 1984, and his daughter Hannah Kupiec, who was born in July 1988.

After graduating from Virginia, Drew and Mary moved north to Brown University, where he studied for his Ph.D. under the famous historian of the American Revolution, Gordon Wood, and Mary earned her Ph.D. in American Civilization. Not surprisingly, Drew’s doctoral research focused on the era of the revolution and its implications for frontier Ohio. His dissertation-turned-book was published under the title Frontier Republic: Ideology and Politics in the Ohio Country, 1780–1825 (Kent State University Press, 1986) and reflected the influence of Wood’s research on the political culture and thought of the revolutionary era. Drew followed with a collection about early Ohio politics, coedited with Jeffrey Brown, entitled The Pursuit of Public Power: Political Culture in Ohio, 1788–1861 (Kent State University Press, 1994). During this time period, Drew was also thinking about the development of the Midwest in conjunction with the bicentennial of the Northwest Ordinance, the foundational statute which shaped the history of the Midwest. This led to Drew’s book with Peter Onuf entitled The Midwest and the Nation: Rethinking the History of an American Region (Indiana University Press, 1990), which offered an exhaustive review of the relevant literature on the Midwest and several conceptualizations of how the Midwest had been viewed in other eras.

About the time of the publication of The Midwest and the Nation and after teaching at Harvard (1980–82), Wellesley (1981–82), and Ball State (1982–90), Drew settled down in his home state of Ohio and took a post in the history department at Miami University, where Mary was already teaching. Miami University, appropriately enough, was founded in 1809 during the earliest stages of the Ohio history that Drew had mastered and would share with the world through his books. Drew’s work on the Midwest continued apace at Miami, where he would teach for twenty-five years. He served as coeditor of Miami’s regionally focused journal The Old Northwest: A Journal of Regional Life and Letters for a half...