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ON JANUARY , 862, COL. CHARLES WHITTLESEY OF THE 20TH Ohio Infantry and commander of what later archivists denoted as “counterinsurgency ” in and around the Ohio River town of Warsaw, Kentucky, forty- five miles downstream from Cincinnati, received a short letter from James M. Vanice, a nonslaveholding house painter living there. In it Vanice “pledge[d] my word that I will neither aid nor take up Arms for the South, so long as the thing remains as it is, that is so long as the Government is not for the Freedom of Slaves.” At first glance this revealing entreaty is hardly surprising , given that historians for the past half century have done all in their power to interpret the Civil War as one that in its barest essence was waged for and against the continuation of chattel slavery. Yet Vanice’s missive does become a clarion when one considers that the author lived in one of four slaveholding states that maintained their neutrality in the conflict, pledging allegiance to the Federal government and its president, Abraham Lincoln (himself a native Kentuckian and lifelong border resident), who had heretofore done all in his power to exclude emancipation from the Union war aims. Moreover Vanice’s 862 reference to the South as an external entity suggests much about the transformation of these border residents’ regional affiliation as well as their own unique sectional identity. Historians find the border slave states, especially Kentucky and Missouri, difficult to categorize in their various studies of the American past. Routinely they consider them as part of the South, largely from the mistaken perception of a fixed early American boundary between freedom and slavery. In this they “The Chrysalis State”: Slavery, Confederate Identity, and the Creation of the Border South CHRISTOPHER PHILLIPS 47 merely project the traditional interpretations by these states’histories and historians who, often products of the very states they study, seek to define their subjects’ experiences alongside the histories in which they themselves were raised and which often actuated their interest in history. Most assume the existence of a clearly defined and static geographical line between the North and South, mirroring (or so we think) the cultural and political divide that led to the Civil War itself. Of course such a view of the war and of American regionalism is both simplistic and inaccurate. It ignores the nature and, more important, the lasting regional consequences of the Civil War, particularly in its most contested space: the western border states. One of the war’s greatest and most overlooked ironies is that while the border slave states east of Appalachia grew more northern after the war, the same such states west of the mountains, Kentucky and Missouri, became decidedly southern. Thus in the end the victorious North created a larger South than the defeated Confederacy could accomplish for itself. In the process of coming to the support of the Union, the border West in the end actually became the border South. In fact nowhere do we see more clearly the emerging reasons for the Civil War, or why it was so staggeringly bitter, than in the lives of people who lived along the Ohio and Missouri rivers. If the nature of the American Civil War can best be gauged by the experience of the complex and fragile border (or “North of South,” as one Ohio observer aptly described the region in 86),2 then perhaps more intriguing is that the war along the middle border cast long shadows, offering the stark outline of an intrasectional crisis—one largely subsumed by the national sectional crisis—by which the middle border itself cleaved, with the Ohio and Missouri rivers assuming their present status as cultural and political boundaries between North and South. This regional alpha-omega created in large part the dual identity of the border, one lost and one found, one western and one southern. More to the point, the unique experience of the western border slave states during the Civil War and their equally anomalous place within and without the Confederacy set the stage for residents of the states below the Ohio and Missouri rivers defining themselves as “southern”specifically as a result of their war experience and their ensuing postwar racial experience. Identity politics surrounding the memory of the Confederate nation, most attributable to these states’ tenuous places within it, offered the vehicle by which the border slave states became part of the South, a section...

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