America’s Western Middle Border Region and Its Inner Civil Wars

In 1875, a decade after Gen. Robert E. Lee’s men stacked their guns at Appomattox, two distinguished Union generals, Philip Sheridan and William T. Sherman, communicated about their native region, what Americans of the Civil War era commonly termed “the West” or the country’s western middle border. The two men grew up less than ten miles apart in southern Ohio and considered themselves westerners. “It is hard to tell who is who,” Sheridan informed Sherman as Reconstruction’s end neared, “and what is what, on that border….The state of affairs is about as mixed as the [Ohio] [R]iver is indefinite as a boundary line” (321).

In his long-anticipated The Rivers Ran Backward: The Civil War and the Remaking of the American Middle Border, historian Christopher Phillips credits the Civil War with transforming the western middle border region, including the slave states of Kentucky and Missouri, and the free states of Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, from a somewhat integrated, interdependent “white western consensus,” into parts of “discrete organizing principles known as North and South” (280, 323). Much like the legendary western historian Frederick Jackson Turner, Phillips interprets “region” more as “a phase of social organization…a form of society rather than an area” (323). While Phillips provides the best available extant history of the war’s effects on the middle border, especially for slaveholding Kentucky and Missouri, he also contributes to the burgeoning field of Civil War–era borderland studies. According to Phillips, along the middle border “the war’s bitter legacy is perhaps clearest and most persistent, because it was most contingent there” (9).¹

America’s regions always have been transitory and fluid in nature. Following Appomattox, Kentucky and Missouri, two ostensibly “loyal” slave states that flirted with but never consummated secession, lined up solidly in the southern camp. As historian E. Merton Coulter famously quipped in 1926, Kentucky “waited until after the war was over to secede from the Union,” a process, according to Phillips, that constituted a form of “politicized obstruction” and “a means of defying Congress’s Republican authority during and after Reconstruction” (317). As for Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, despite considerable antiwar dissent and antiblack sentiment, residents of these states aligned with the North. Following the war a new region, the Far West, emerged across the Great Plains in Nevada and California, while the northern reaches of the old middle border included the newly termed urbanized Middle West and the rural Midwest.²

The Rivers Ran Backward provides exceptionally strong treatment of the Civil War in Kentucky and Missouri. Students expecting a linear narrative of the evolution of the war and Reconstruction in these states, however, will be confounded. Phillips quite properly complicates his narrative by unearthing evidence that renders airtight generalizations all but impossible. Residents on both sides of the Ohio River, before, during, and after the war, disagreed sharply among themselves—often resorting to violence to settle personal scores—on such topics as slavery, abolition, states’ rights versus federalism, secession, emancipation, the recruitment of black troops, and Reconstruction. Scholars have long grasped the ambiguous, conflicted, fluid, and varied allegiances of border state citizens throughout the Civil War era. But no previous historian has researched, documented, and identified the inner civil wars within the larger Civil War as minutely or as thoroughly as Phillips.

The war created fissures within not only the western border state region generally but “families, communities, and consciences” as well (173). Phillips maintains that on both sides of the slave-free state divide questions of loyalty and disloyalty permeated citizens’ lives. Gratuitous localized violence dominated life during and after the war. After reading Phillips’s book, one wonders how certain rural sections of these states even functioned—educated their children and fed and governed themselves—while fighting such fierce and persistent internecine local battles.

Kentucky and Missouri contained persons with varying attitudes toward race and...