The Rivers Ran Backward: The Civil War and the Remaking of the American Middle Border by Christopher Phillips (review)

For mid-nineteenth-century Americans living in what historian Christopher Phillips calls the West's "middle border"—Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, and Missouri—resisting the onset of armed internecine conflict in 1861 and the change it wrought became an exercise in futility. Indeed, by looking at the complexities of the middle border region during the Civil War era, Phillips's well-researched work synthesizes much of the growing body of scholarship that collectively has deepened our understanding of how sectional strife transformed the region.

Phillips's monograph traces how the West's traditional political culture accommodated slavery and organized the region's society in both tangible and intangible ways. Slavery served as the foundation of conflict and after the war emerged as the "most unreconciled cause among those white residents who endured it" (pp. 8–9). In Phillips's view, the traditional western perspective centered on the compatibility of slave-based agrarianism and emerging industrial modernity. Business interests in antebellum Cincinnati, for instance, supported chattel slavery partly because of a reliance on southern trade. Pre-war abolitionism altered regional consensus and shifted the trajectory of the western middle border by convincing most white westerners that slavery was not a moral issue, a stance influenced by many whites' racial conservatism. Ultimately, westerners could not avoid the rancor wrought by the politicization of slavery as abolitionism dragged them into the fray.

The outbreak of war in 1861 fractured the region's moderate consensus. A commitment to slavery in Kentucky and Missouri evoked somber sobriety and cautious patriotism even in the midst of burgeoning political divisions. The changing political landscape reflected the degree to which Americans in the middle border could no longer depend on clear lines of political geography. Moderates, Phillips declares, "found themselves conflicted over how to view and handle the divided populations in the border slave states" (p. 156). Conflict effectively marginalized the politics of regional consensus, particularly by 1862 when federal forces "were in firm possession of the middle border" (p. 169). Divided allegiances, the growing number of refugees, personal feuds, and the taxing demands placed on local infrastructure by wartime exigencies, particularly in Kentucky and Missouri, turned local citizens into outsiders on their home turf.

Wartime contingencies effectively finished off western regional consensus. Abraham Lincoln's emancipation edict, Phillips contends, splintered the region by "driving a wedge between the middle border's free and slave states" (p. 211). Partisan loyalty politics drove the region's response to the presidential order, as manifested by race riots in places such as Cincinnati, Chicago, and New Albany, Indiana. In Kentucky and Missouri, a series of "shadow wars" targeted the wives and children, white and black, of both Federal and Confederate troops (p. 268). Republicans in the upper Midwest confronted the emergence of Copperheadism by founding Union Leagues and women's auxiliaries to such loyalty organizations. In more than a few instances, notes Phillips, "social violence roiled communities of allegiance into adversarial collectives" (p. 273).

Phillips concludes that sectional peace failed to restore the middle border's tradition of consensus. Unreconciled wartime antagonisms, racial hostility, political enmity, and personal distrust converged into a postwar ethos centered on the "cultural politics of irreconciliation" (p. 309). Antiwar Democrats and Republicans crafted their own interpretation of wartime events and, like Americans elsewhere, allowed their postbellum worldview to be influenced accordingly. Postwar antagonisms, says Phillips, were molded by soldiers and civilians on both sides of the region's major rivers, so that by the early twentieth century, the pre-war western consensus of slavery and freedom "was vanquished by antagonistic cultures of slavery and abolition under new regional names: southern, northern, and midwestern." Change, the author proclaims, "starts at the margins, but it is completed in the middle" (p. 338).

As one of the leading authorities on the history of nineteenthcentury Middle America...