The Rivers Ran Backward: The Civil War and the Remaking of the American Middle Border

by Christopher Phillips

Most Americans imagine the Civil War in terms of clear and defined boundaries of freedom and slavery: a straightforward division between the slave states of Kentucky and Missouri and the free states of Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Kansas. However, residents of these western border states, Abraham Lincoln's home region, had far more ambiguous identities - and political loyalties - than we commonly assume.
In The Rivers Ran Backward, historian Christopher Phillips sheds light on the fluid regional identities of the "Middle Border" states during the Civil War era. Far from forming a fixed and static boundary between the North and South, the border states experienced fierce internal conflicts over their political and social loyalties. White supremacy and widespread support for the existence of slavery pervaded the "free" states of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, which had much closer economic and cultural ties to the South, while those in Kentucky and Missouri held little identification with the South except over slavery. Debates raged at every level, from the individual to the state, in parlors, churches, schools, and public meeting places, among families, neighbors, and friends. Ultimately, the violence of the Civil War and cultural politics in its aftermath proved to be the strongest determining factor in shaping the states' regional identities, leaving an indelible imprint on the way in which Americans thought both of themselves and others.
The Rivers Ran Backward reveals the complex history of the western border states as they struggled with questions of nationalism, racial politics, secession, neutrality, loyalty, and place - even as the Civil War threatened to tear the nation apart. In this work, Phillips shows that the Civil War was more than a conflict pitting the North against the South, but one within the West that reshaped American regionalism.

Genres: Nonfiction, American Civil War, History, Civil War, American History

528 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 2016

About the author

Christopher Phillips is Professor of History and Department Head at the University of Cincinnati.

Reviews

[Ioana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Phillips’ new history, The Rivers Ran Backward, provides a window into the Civil War that has often been overlooked, or misrepresented: a view from the West (including Kentucky, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Kansas).

It’s never occurred to me to question the Civil War as anything other than a binary phenomenon (slavery vs. abolitionism, North vs. South), so this was an incredibly fascinating read for me, opening me eyes to an entirely new layer of complexity I had been in ignorance of.

While traditionally, the Ohio River has been imagined as a continuation of the Mason-Dixon line and has served as a border between North and South in popular reconstructions of the historical narrative of the War, Phillips shows that in fact, regional Western politics cannot be encapsulated in this dual manner. For example, Kentucky and Missouri were slave states, yet more white soldiers from those states fought for the Union than did for the Confederacy, with white soldiers from the free Western States also supporting both sides.

Essentially, this is a book that challenges commonly accepted dualistic conceptions of WWII by exploring tensions underlying Western regionalism such as the struggle between collectivism and individualism (which are not the same, but seem at first to parallel the Southern traditionalism – Northern progressivism construction). Phillip shows how our Northern-Southern popular memory does not accurately depict the local particularities of the West, and makes a strong case that a Western perspective is needed in order for us to better understand conflicts and politics in the region today.

A meticulously researched, well argued, enlightening perspective on the Civil War. Absolutely Recommended!*

*This is not a popular history, but a dense academic history. Enjoyment may vary.

I received my copy through Netgalley. All opinions are solely my own.

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This review originally published in Looking For a Good Book. Rated 3.5 of 5

Christopher Phillips' nearly 500 page exploration of the American Civil War and the effect it had on the people and communities of the states in the middle of the conflict is an exhausting, but informative read.

Phillips has done a remarkable amount of research (note that nearly one-third of the book is made of 'Notes' 'Bibliography' and 'Index') and lays it out for the reader in eight chapters. They are:

1. White Flows the River: Freedom and Unfreedom in the Early National West
2. Babel: Changed Persistence on Slavery’s Borderland
3. The Ten-Year War: Sectional Politics in a Dividing Region
4. No North—No South—No East—No West: The Fiction of the Wartime Middle Ground
5. Netherworld of War: Civilians, Soldiers, and the Dominion of War
6. Bitter Harvest: Emancipation and the Politics of Loyalty
7. Shadow Wars: The Crucible of Social Violence
8. Southern Cross, North Star: The Politics of Irreconciliation

I felt that the first three chapters were quite dense with information. My reading was slow and methodical and still I couldn't quite take it all in. Typically when we are presented with a book on the Civil War we're thinking about North/South and the soldiers or the locations where battles were key. But this book has us looking at a completely different aspect of the Civil War - the reactions of citizens in outlying states (Midwest and West); the social and political turmoil caused by the war in communities not directly, physically part of the war, as well as those caught in the middle - battle ground states may have acted as staging areas, but not everyone in those locales took part in the battles. But just as with nearly any political action, neighbor often disagreed with one another, and not everyone in a northern state agreed with the emancipation of the slaves, just as not everyone in a southern state agreed to the right of keeping slaves.

The fourth chapter was particularly interesting to me. It hadn't occurred to me that there may be fiction available "of the Wartime Middle Ground." I've taken notes and have a few works to look for. In particular, I'm interested in reading some Annie Fellows Johnston. Some of her works are "set in an idyllic and fictional Bluegrass town" that "used war and Lost Cause regional stereotypes to confirm northern readers' sectionalized conceptions of Kentucky as a Confederate state while appealing to southern readers with gauzy images of the region's benign antebellum slaveholding past."

War is a work of politics and politicians and Phillips lays that out for us, and it's hard not to read through this and see some parallels in today's politics - which is frightening.

While I have an interest in history in general and Civil War history in particular, I don't tend to read a lot of history books. The bulk of my non-fiction reading is biographies, entertainment/theatre, and nature related works and not academic works too often. For me, this was a very difficult book to read and only partly because of the material itself (I find it difficult to read about strife and politics). It's just so... academic. I.e: Dry.

I thought about this, knowing I would soon have to write my review, as I began the conclusion. The opening paragraph reads:

The antagonisms that remade the former middle border region were not the
result alone of semicentennial commemorations of the Civil War. A half-century
of politics—formally at the national and state levels and informally as innumerable,
personalized war experiences retold by countless civilians and soldiers on
both sides of the rivers—formed exclusivist cultural narratives of that bitterly
lived war.
In the region’s former slave states, white residents did more than distort a
quasi-Confederate past. Pushing past war boundaries, they articulated a southernized
narrative of their states to transcend the immediate celebration of a
Confederate heritage and achieve cultural identification with the Old South.
Commemoratively, they bridged the Confederate tradition to obscure their
loyal wartimes by accessing their slaveholding pasts and articulating the shared
experience between the antebellum and the postwar South. Deeply contested,
the halting construction of white southern identity buttressed their opposition
to the destruction of slavery, to freedpeople’s acquisition of citizenship rights,
and to all those who had accomplished the latter.

It makes complete sense, but I had to read through it twice to make sure I was really understanding what Phillips was saying here. And reading paragraphs like this twice is a very slow process.

Looking for a good book? The Rivers Ran Backward by Christopher Phillips is a thorough look at a new angle of the American Civil War. For those interested in social and political (and war) history, this should be on your wish list but the academic presentation of the material may turn off the casual reader.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.

[Tom · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have read many books about the Civil War and the periods before and after. While the subject matter of this book is interesting, I found it very difficult to read. I put it down several times for long periods because of this. The early portions of the book are dense with statistics. The most interesting and easy to read portion of the book was the last section, that described the post war situation and positioning of the southern narrative in the border states.

[Scott Umphrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most authoritative books on the Border South. Loved every minute of it!

[Maddie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read for comps. Examines the West (border states) in the war and argues against a strict North/South binary. Neutrality and compromise pushed this middle border to take sides.

[Matt Lee · Rating 3 out of 5]

Christopher Phlillips’ The Rivers Ran Backwards is a dense and exhaustive analysis of the cultural and political history of the midwest, or “middle border”, from the early 19th to 20th century. By examining the deterioration in the midwest of political moderation, nuance, and cohesion during the 1840s-1850s, to the hardlined political polarization and extremism of the Civil War years, Phillips chronicles a western narrative often overshadowed by the north-south binary. Phillips’ central objective is to explore how the Civil War era and its corresponding issues of race, slavery, and emancipation changed the cultural and political landscape of the midwest over time. In essence, The Rivers Ran Backward is a focus on the “cultural politics of region”, (Phillips 9) and thus, the formation of the midwestern regional identity in response to the Civil War. Phillips argues that this distinctive midwestern regional identity was defined by “a long struggle between … northern progressivism and … southern traditionalism” (8). While often a difficult read, Phillips’ tandem of extensive secondary scholarship and primary accounts from midwestern citizens provides a relatively convincing argument for the cultural transformation of the “middle border” resulting from Civil War era politics. The Rivers Ran Backward is an immensely difficult read, loaded with academic vocabulary and themes, it would not be uncommon for one to re-read the same passage multiple times in order to fully decipher Phillips’ point(s). Thus, The Rivers Ran Backwards’ denseness requires at times a herculean effort to power through. Phillips’ book most closely aligns with the neoliberal school of thought, as the author consistently focuses on institutions, ideas, and a complicated nationalism marred by said competing ideologies.

[Arkrayder · Rating 3 out of 5]

I received this book from NetGalley in return for an honest review. Thank you!

This was an interesting book to read. It was fascinating to read of the happenings and goings on during the American Civil War.

The book covers in detail how in the border states the Civil War wasn't completely about the abolishment of slavery, but that the overall story was much more complicated, and that the war divided communities.

I found the information in the text very interesting with facts I didn't know before. If you are intending to read this book to learn about the military history of the Civil War you are wasting your time. In the chapters covering the Civil War itself, the narrative concentrates on the effects of the war, on state and local politics and on communities decimated by frequent lawlessness, often partly ignored and endorsed by military and civilian authorities.

This is a hard book to read and needs concentration and effort from the reader. It is well - written and really shines because of its detailed individual case histories of the people who witnessed the Civil War. Anyone interested in the American Civil War and wants a different perspective on the story should read this book. An enjoyable read.