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Rebels on the Border: Civil War, Emancipation, and the Reconstruction of Kentucky and Missouri (Conflicting Worlds: New Dimensions of the American Civil War) 1st Edition, Kindle Edition

4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 7 ratings

Rebels on the Border offers a remarkably compelling and significant study of the Civil War South’s highly contested and bloodiest border states: Kentucky and Missouri. By far the most complex examination to date, the book sharply focuses on the “borderland” between the free North and the Confederate South. As a result, Rebels on the Border deepens and enhances understanding of the sectional conflict, the Civil War, and Reconstruction.

After slaves in central Kentucky and Missouri gained their emancipation, author Aaron Astor contends, they transformed informal kin and social networks of resistance against slavery into more formalized processes of electoral participation and institution building. At the same time, white politics in Kentucky’s Bluegrass and Missouri’s Little Dixie underwent an electoral realignment in response to the racial and social revolution caused by the war and its aftermath. Black citizenship and voting rights provoked a violent white reaction and a cultural reinterpretation of white regional identity. After the war, the majority of wartime Unionists in the Bluegrass and Little Dixie joined former Confederate guerrillas in the Democratic Party in an effort to stifle the political ambitions of former slaves.

Rebels on the Border is not simply a story of bitter political struggles, partisan guerrilla warfare, and racial violence. Like no other scholarly account of Kentucky and Missouri during the Civil War, it places these two crucial heartland states within the broad context of local, southern, and national politics.

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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Based upon a broad range of primary sources, including manuscript collections, state and national records, court decisions, and newspapers, Astor's narrative is compellingly argued and
spritely written." - Carl E. Kramer, Journal of American History

About the Author

Aaron Astor is assistant professor of history at Maryville College.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B008OKBWX2
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ LSU Press; 1st edition (May 1, 2012)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ May 1, 2012
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 1063 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 343 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 7 ratings

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Aaron Astor
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Top reviews from the United States

  • Reviewed in the United States on January 1, 2013
    This excellent comparative history examines how and why two of the South's most important Border Slave States--Missouri and Kentucky--remained in the Union and, in the case of Kentucky, why numerous Bluegrass slaveholders opposed secession in order to safeguard the state's peculiar institution. Presenting his argument in cogent fashion, the author, Aaron Astor, shows both his mastery of the secondary literature on antebellum, wartime, and post-bellum Kentucky as well as his knowledge of archival evidence and period newspapers. Even with a spate of new books on Civil War era Kentucky, one learns much that is new from Rebels on the Border. To cite but one example, the explanation Astor provides of the strength of Kentucky's conservative unionists in 1861, better enables readers to appreciate why, in a bid to protect slavery, so many of the state's slaveholders opposed the methods of Cotton South secessionists.

    The study, which uses impressive statistical evidence that Astor gleaned from select, but densely enslaved Missouri and Kentucky counties, contains insightful observations about slave patrols and informs readers as to why initially formidable unionism in the respective states(with very different political bases)ultimately collapsed, giving way to efforts to reestablish what the author terms "white man's democracy" in the face of the challenge of "Black Suffrage and the New Political Order." Finally, Astor provides his readers and students with a tidy, yet authoritative conclusion.

    This book is highly recommended.

    Thomas M. Grace
    5 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on October 23, 2016
    CHRISTMAS PRESENT
  • Reviewed in the United States on February 16, 2013
    By revealing the polarities within each section before the war and the making of common cause between the majority Unionists and the Confederates after the war, Astor's book "complicates the notion of sectionalism itself." Ironically, the opposing sides in those two regions fought for the same reason, to preserve slavery; for the same cause they worked together in post-war years to bring down blacks who had risen during radical northern dominance and to keep them down. That story "foreshadows the historical narrative of the rest of the nation in the later nineteenth century."

    I shuddered to learn early in the book that about two hundred men and women gathered on Christmas Eve 1866 on the grounds of the First Presbyterian Church in former Unionist Danville, Kentucky to hang Al McRoberts, a black man. On that spot, the Daughters of the Confederacy erected a memorial to Confederate soldiers. One may visit it on the edge of the campus of Centre College, where I taught English in 1960 and '61.

    One of Astor's most well-documented and revealing arguments is that "in a microcosm of national events the slave population would prove to be the real engine of political transformation during the Civil War and Reconstruction era."

    Astor expresses his theories with cogent clarity, and his mastery of research provides narrative details that renders this book uncommonly readable, and, perhaps, revolutionary.
    4 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on January 3, 2013
    I would like to recommend this book as a corrective to simplistic conceptions of the American Civil War as a struggle between the North of budding industry and independent farmers opposed to a slaveholding South of great plantations and oppressed white poor. I would like to recommend a book that is the product of so much detailed and often correctly aimed research. I would like to recommend a book that gets so much right. I would like to recommend a book that shines a spotlight on a geographic area that I have studied intensely. But in the final analysis, I must demur.
    Aaron Astor compares the Bluegrass Region of Kentucky with Missouri's Little Dixie. Kentucky and Missouri, in common with the other border states of Maryland and Delaware were slaveholding states that stayed within the Union. Astor believes that so many slaveholders in both Kentucky and Missouri opposed secession in 1861 because they believed slavery as an institution would be, in the end, better protected within the Union than within an embattled Confederacy. Over the course of the war and reconstruction, these conservative Unionists were gradually pushed toward the Southern position as the war changed from a war to protect the Union and preserve slavery within its mid-19th century boundaries and became a war to abolish slavery and give former slaves full legal and political equality.
    I do not have the expertise required to evaluate what the author says about Kentucky, although most of what is said sounds plausible. But much of what Astor says about Missouri contains dubious assumptions, over-interpretation of a few incidents, or even misinterpretation.
    The first question is the relative size of Missouri's conservative Unionist block. Astor recognizes that Missouri contained a great many Germans, immigrants from northern states, and Ozark whites, nearly all of whom opposed slavery. Yet he still looks to Missouri's conservative slaveholders as the most important source of Unionism in the state, and certainly within the Little Dixie region. He asserts on page 4, "The vast majority of whites in . . . Missouri fought for the Union . . . most did so [because] they felt that the perpetuation of the Union was the only way to preserve the slave-based social order." It is true that historians generally believe that Missouri provided over twice as many men for the North (100,000) as for the South (40,000). But thousands of the former were Black slaves and tens of thousands were Germans and Ozark whites who detested slavery. Significant numbers of anti-slave Germans from southern Illinois crossed the Mississippi to enlist in St. Louis Union regiments. There is no way to demonstrate and much reason to doubt that "most" of the "majority" of Missouri whites who wore Union uniforms did so to "preserve the slave-based social order (p. 4)." In a related matter, on page 176, Astor says that even as late as mid-1863, "radicals argued insistently--and erroneously--that most of the state's remaining slaveholders were rebels . . . ". How does he know that they were not active Confederate sympathizers? No Gallop Polls were taken in 1863.
    Although Astor mentions the federal tariff on hemp several times, he does not seem to grasp its importance to Kentucky and Missouri hemp-growers. The Confederacy was opposed to tariffs on principle. Hemp barons needed both the tariff and slavery to continue profitable large-scale production.
    Sometimes Astor appears to contradict himself. On page 276n8, one reads that after the war, "Where white landowners still required farm help, they turned to white immigrants. Especially in central Missouri, where a larger German and Irish population already lived, wage-earning immigrants easily replaced the labor once performed by slaves." But on page 165 we read, ". . . blacks remaining on small farms in central Kentucky and central Missouri found themselves in a favorable negotiating position their landlords. . . . blacks held a monopoly over the labor necessary to grow corn, oats, hemp, and tobacco; . . . whites understood that blacks were the only viable labor supply."
    Sometimes he is not sufficiently critical of the source material. Astor reports on page 211 that in Missouri in 1865, petitions for black suffrage " . . . included signatures from thousands of African Americans, even in interior counties; Platte County on the state's western border offered 3,816 signatures alone." But according to the federal census, Platte County contained only 3,369 slaves and free persons of color in 1860. After much flight across the river to Kansas during the Civil War years, the county's Negro population had been reduced to 1,192 in 1870. Nor did the county contain any large towns in which freed slaves might have gathered. Since few whites in this rural tobacco and hemp-growing county are likely to have signed such a petition, either someone has misreported numbers or the original petitions were fraudulent.
    Sometimes Astor is simply wrong. Four hundred fifty, not 150 guerrillas attacked Lawrence, Kansas in 1863. Astor says that after Missouri slaves were freed in 1865, "bushwackers . . . now used terror and violence to remove all remaining African Americans from the region" (p. 135). In fact, one of the less important guerrilla leaders did threaten to kill blacks who did not flee within 10 days and did in fact lynch one elderly man, but the black population of the county in which the incident took place declined only from 5,087 in 1860 to 4,038 in 1870. Similar declines took place in counties which recorded no expulsion threats. Astor's assertion that after April, 1865, "The war over Union and Confederacy had devolved into a veritable race war" is worse than hyperbole. It is misrepresentation, at least for Missouri. Serious tension and strife took place between the races along with a level of violence that is much to be deplored, but ought not to shock when the level of racial violence we have seen in America down to our own time is kept in mind.
    Astor does not acknowledge the importance of the Missouri-Kansas border war of the late 1850s as an origin of the guerrilla violence during the Civil War in Little Dixie. George Caleb Bingham's painting "Order No. 11" is generally considered to represent opposition to a particular Federal war measure and the commander who ordered it rather than to "belated Confederatism."
    There are other problematic assertions, but enough have been mentioned to demonstrate that this book should be read only with considerable caution.
    11 people found this helpful
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