From West to Midwest: Regional Identity and the Civil War

Christopher Phillips, a historian regarded for richly detailed biographies of prominent Missouri slaveowners, has thrown down the gauntlet in The Rivers Ran Backward. In his study of the Ohio River Valley, Phillips challenges the presumption that Kentuckians perceived themselves as southerners prior to the Civil War. They saw themselves as westerners and not southerners, according to The Rivers Ran Backward, the same regional sphere as residents in southern Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois. That perception would change, but not until after the Civil War, when the abolition of slavery induced whites in the northernmost western slave states to embrace the Lost Cause.

The Rivers Ran Backward lines up nicely besides Matthew Stanley’s The Loyal West, published concurrently with Phillips’s book. Stanley reaches the same conclusion regarding the post-war transformation of Kentucky, although his real achievement is his analysis of southern Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois. Loyal West argues that residents on the north bank of the Ohio River underwent a post-war transformation of their own. His book makes a significant contribution to American historiography by examining how north bank residents after the war came to look down upon their Kentucky neighbors as primitive and uneducated.

It is the pre-war analysis that makes Phillips’s work and Stanley’s work so radical. “No consensus over the meaning of North or South existed in the Ohio Valley prior to the Civil War,” Stanley asserts (143). Loyal West recounts how prewar Louisville businessmen and Cincinnati businessmen interacted with clients on both sides of the Ohio River. On the eve of the Civil War, the commercial towns along the river saluted their counterparts as true Unionists. As a result of the war, however, the regional sense of shared roots gradually disappeared. White residents on the Ohio-Indiana-Illinois side of the middle border self-identified as northerners vis-à-vis Kentucky. White racism remained embedded on both sides of the Ohio River, but the north bankers portrayed themselves more civilized while the south bankers built monuments to the Confederate heroes of the Blue Grass State.

Each publication warrants a careful reading. Although the authors reach many of the same conclusions, the scope and organization of the two books are significantly different. Stanley devotes more of his text to post-war developments than Phillips. Nearly 40 percent of Stanley’s book examines the post-war attitudes of north-bankers and follows the prevalence of anti-southern attitudes and anti-black violence into the twentieth century. Loyal West also follows Kentucky’s post-war transformation in order to highlight the scale of the post-war changes that took place north of the Ohio River. Phillips, meanwhile, concludes with a single post-war chapter after describing a culturally unified river valley from the early 1800s to 1860 and how that cultural unity disintegrated by 1870 in the wake of the emancipation controversy.

Prior to the war, the rural culture on the north side of the Ohio River Valley mirrored Kentucky’s rural culture in many respects, both authors assert. Local governance was a common practice on both sides of the river, and each author highlights the continuing influence of the Regulators, a local governance tradition dating back to the 1700s in the northern slave states. Phillips points out that Henry Clay perceived himself to be a westerner and not a southerner. Following his death, residents on both sides of the Ohio River hailed Clay’s legend as a national leader who rejected the labels North and South. “Slavery and white supremacy were interwoven into the fabric of the entire western region,” argues Phillips (10). Following Lincoln’s election, the strong sense of regional unity spawned a neutralist response in Kentucky and in southern Illinois and Indiana.

The two books vary in their geographic scope. Phillips includes quite a bit of Missouri history...