Bringing the Civil War Home: Local History and the Ohio Valley

The Ohio Valley is American history's great laboratory. Few other regions of the country give scholars as representative a sample (to borrow from our friends in the hard sciences) of the United States in all the nation's maddening and fascinating complexity. The experiments we can conduct in this region are necessarily more complex than those in homogeneous regions elsewhere but are ever more telling for when we apply historical lessons to our own time. Historical middle America, contrary to its popular contemporary image, is a region not of representative American homogeneity but rather of representative American diversity.

Yet it is a hard region to study for the same reasons that make it attractive. As Stephen Rockenbach points out, the river that has united it has also come to divide it in many ways—though certainly this was not always the case. The region lies in numerous states, whose archives and records are scattered in as many state capitals and university libraries. And place matters. There is no monolithic Ohio Valley in the same way as there is—or is imagined to be—a Mississippi Delta or a Tidewater or a New England. The consistency comes in diversity. We recognize and embrace the idea that one district is farmed by the descendants of Scots-Irish frontiersmen, while over the nearby creek a community of Swiss immigrants or African Americans planted itself and eventually thrived. And we put that place together with a hundred others with the same patchwork of histories and identities in the Ohio Valley, and something draws it together, gives it a sense of cohesion despite itself.

As we try to build regional narratives from this patchwork, it is hard to overstate the need for good local histories such as Stephen I. Rockenbach's War upon Our Border and William A. Penn's Kentucky Rebel Town. We rely on these sorts of books as we navigate the muddy banks and deceptive shoals of Ohio Valley historiography. Not only do they tell us about the communities they study, but their methods and interpretations show us what we need to keep an eye out for as we conduct research and draw conclusions elsewhere. And in those two phases of writing local history—research and interpretation—these books give their readers usable models to apply elsewhere across the region. We will end up esteeming—and citing—these books for very different reasons as the historiography flows downstream.

Rockenbach considers two Ohio Valley communities. Frankfort, Kentucky, and Corydon, Indiana, are the stages upon which he frames an Edward L. Ayers In the Presence of Mine Enemies–style (New York: Norton, 2003) comparative study. These two towns make interesting cases for how deep the tendrils of the Ohio Valley extend beyond the river's bank. Neither sits on the Ohio; Corydon is set back on an inland creek while Frankfort is one of the larger port towns on the Kentucky River as it snakes its way northward. For all the pair can tell us, though, we never get the satisfaction of having the towns speak to one another. There are tantalizing hints of cross-border relationships between Corydon and Brandenburg, Kentucky, for example, but the sources seem not to allow a deep investigation there, and Frankfort has no comparable relationship.

In form, Rockenbach gives us a whirlwind tour of these two communities, covering roughly a decade from the mid-1850s to the mid-1870s in each town in just under two hundred pages. Quotable archival collections and a backbone of newspaper commentary underlay the analysis of each, but the narrative moves very quickly, and some readers might have a tough time making themselves at home. As we blitz through fugitive slaves, secession movements...