Civilians and Cities in a Western Borderland

The argument that the border states played a crucial role in the Civil War is nothing new. As early as 1927, Edward Conrad Smith established a thesis that became standard fare in Civil War narratives. He argued that the vast border region—which included not only the northernmost tier of slave states but also the southern portion of Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana, as well as what is now West Virginia—was home to a white population so immense that it had the power to sway the outcome of the war in either direction. Many subsequent historians have reiterated Smith's view that the border was important because of its military and political significance. They cite, as evidence, Lincoln's anxious comments in an 1861 letter: "to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game."¹

These historians are primarily concerned with how the border figured into Union strategy and how the region affected the outcome of the war. In particular, they focus on how close border states came to secession and ask how essential border loyalty was to securing Union victory. Historians who pursue these questions tend to situate the border states as a crucial component of Union strategy early in the war: white men on the border wavered between loyalty and secession, but Lincoln artfully managed to keep them from seceding until the region was militarily secured. Lost, in such an approach, are the complexities internal to the border: antebellum sectionalism, religious disputes, gendered conflicts, the black struggle for freedom and rights, and white politics of slavery and loyalty.

Recent years have seen scholars take a different approach to the significance of the border states in the Civil War era. Concerned less with the border's role in the national political narrative, these scholars treat the border as a third section, not just as the line dividing slavery from freedom. While they do not all agree on how to characterize the region (or, indeed, even where it is) their work shares certain assumptions. First, they view the border and its residents as intrinsically significant, regardless of their relationship to national events. Second, they contend that the border was meaningfully different from both the North and the South and that border residents consciously viewed themselves as neither northern nor southern. Finally, they focus on states west of the Appalachians. Their border region is as much defined by its westernness as it is by straddling the line dividing slavery from freedom.

While some historians, such as Stanley Harrold, argue that differences over slavery starkly divided the region, most recent scholars of the western border focus more on what unified its residents. Christopher Phillips, Aaron Astor, Matthew Salafia, and Adam Arenson have all highlighted characteristics common to people living on either side of slavery's border. Among white border dwellers, these included shared commercial and economic ties, a sense of difference from and antagonism toward the east, widespread racism and white supremacy, and opposition to abolitionism. Older work on the border states, exemplified by Harrison Trexler's 1914 study, Slavery in Missouri, minimized the central importance of unfree labor to the region and perpetuated a myth of the mildness and "humanity" of border slavery that has long since been debunked by scholars such as Diane Mutti Burke. However, it is only in recent years that historians have fully recognized the persistent significance of slavery to white border residents. Patrick Lewis and Luke Harlow have demonstrated that proslavery unionism defined white border attitudes toward national politics and the Civil War. For their part, black border residents, and their protracted struggle for freedom and equality, have also received relatively scant scholarly attention.

Historians have not only drawn our attention...