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  • The Loyal West: Civil War and Reunion in Middle America by Matthew E. Stanley
  • Joseph M. Beilein Jr.
Matthew E. Stanley. The Loyal West: Civil War and Reunion in Middle America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017. 288 pp. 12 b/w illus. ISBN: 9780252082245 (paper), $24.95.

Matthew E. Stanley's The Loyal West tells an important story of identity transformation, revealing the ways middle Americans struggled with their places in polarizing debates. Stanley takes us to a place—both geographic and chronological—in which white Americans of the so-called center found a political middle ground defined by real and imagined victories as well as pragmatic and sometimes disturbing compromises—a familiar theme in American history that has echoed down through the years. Indeed, Stanley's history of political identity in the Midwest during the Civil War era is a microcosm of a much longer history of America.

Stanley's central argument is that the Civil War "divided and destroyed the First West, creating a new Loyal West that was synonymous with Union loyalty" (2). While southern Illinoisans, Indianans, and Ohioans had once shared identities with other westerners living south of the Ohio River in Kentucky, the war cleaved them apart. Kentucky became southern, either during or after the war. And the white men and women of southern Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois became "loyal westerners." This identity, Stanley points out, was constructed in opposition to not only disloyal southerners but also radical, abolitionist Yankees of the Great Lakes and the Northeast. Fittingly, they wedged their identities into a middle ground between what they viewed as political extremes.

In laying out his thesis, Stanley makes a number of compelling points. One of his more dynamic contentions is his presentation of the process through which Union veterans who identified as loyal westerners "asserted their political and cultural distinctiveness even while concurrently sponsoring the Two Americas thesis, thus hastening sectional reconciliation and underwriting the intellectual construction of the twentieth-century Midwest" (132). It was these men, especially the soldiers who served under Ohioan William T. Sherman, who at once waved the "bloody shirt" in one hand and clenched the other in a fist as a threat to African Americans and radicals who pushed for racial equality. Acting as cover for southern diehards, midwesterners unfortunately gave credibility to the idea that the war was not about slavery but [End Page 92] the restoration of the Union. Indeed, by creating this new identity, they reconciled their racism with patriotism.

The Loyal West is organized to present a complex narrative in a clear, seamless manner. Stanley thoughtfully structures his book so each chapter focuses on a topic that is important to moving his argument forward while also hewing closely to chronology. Beginning with a unified West then moving through successive breaks and back toward reunification, The Loyal West presents a vast array of evidence, introduces hundreds of characters, and explores dozens of events in a way that allows even a novice of the Civil War to follow along.

Both the quantity and quality of Stanley's research are impressive. To look through his notes or even glance at the bibliography is to see hundreds of miles of travel, weeks spent in archives, and a significant debt. Most of all, his exploration of archives across the Midwest and as far as California and Washington, D.C., reveals a devotion to his chosen pursuit that is the essential ingredient for a work this thorough.

That being said, this reviewer has only one minor complaint about The Loyal West. Stanley subdivides his chapters, separating them into sections with headings such as "The Cult of the Loyal West" and "Loyal Westerners in Blue," which help to track the narrative. However, a talented writer of history such as Stanley hardly needs such crutches, which too often break up the narrative flow and slow the story down.

Overall, this is a much-needed history that fills in an important yet neglected part of the Civil War story. More than that, The Loyal West explores recurring themes in American history in which people infuse events with competing meanings, deny basic truths, employ or revert to reaction, and construct identities...

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