![]() Of course, no one called these states the “Midwest” at the time it was simply the West, the first American frontier, and many of the earliest settlers actually came from the South. In 1787, the Northwest Ordinance opened up the region above the Ohio River-and prohibited slavery in the states that would form there. One reason the Midwest resisted the designation of either North or South is that it could claim allegiances to both. “They were telling these stories back then.” “From the very first research trip I took, from the very first letter I read, these people were talking about it,” says Phillips. He spent decades digging through various archives, recovering the diaries and letters of ordinary people, and revealing just how close the war felt, even in the Midwest. ![]() Yet Phillips’s book matters not only because of what he found but where he found it. The Rivers Ran Backward (published in May by Oxford University Press) is the most important of his career, 505 dense pages on how the American heartland-Kentucky, Missouri, Kansas, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio-made for a darker, messier homefront than we’ve been conditioned to expect. Phillips, head of UC’s history department, has written or edited six previous books. Once the war arrived, those Midwesterners reacted with anger, confusion, and fear. Photograph by Joseph Fuqua II, University of Cincinnati Rather, they landed somewhere in the murky middle-and were far more interested in protecting their businesses (or cultivating their own deeply racist beliefs) than in advancing the cause of either side. In The Rivers Ran Backward: The Civil War and the Remaking of the American Middle Border, Phillips reminds us that in the 19th century, most white Midwesterners neither uniformly loved nor hated slavery. It’s a mindset symbolized by our pride in Cincinnati’s National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, with its structure of weathered copper and travertine stone sitting majestically on the victorious riverbank.īut a new book by Christopher Phillips, a professor at the University of Cincinnati, is challenging this comfortable view. In heroic biographies and academic histories, we read about righteous abolitionists defeating faraway racists, and we know what team we’re on. Indiana and Illinois can pat themselves on the back for Abraham Lincoln Ohio can answer with Ulysses S. For Buckeyes and other Midwesterners, it feels good to be on the right side of the river, and thus, on the right side of history. Today, we think of the Civil War as a great clash between North and South, freedom and slavery-between two ideological opposites neatly divided by the Ohio River. Image Courtesy of Oxford University Press Image Courtesy of Cincinnati Museum Center Roebling’s half-finished “Ohio River Bridge.” The war interrupted construction until 1865. “But from the treatment I received by the people generally I found it little better than in Virginia.” A drawing from Harper’s Weekly in 1862, showing soldiers crossing John A. “I thought upon coming to a free state like Ohio that I would find every door thrown open to receive me,” he later wrote. On this count, however, the city disappointed him, and Malvin left after only two years. But he also came to Cincinnati because it was a Northern city, one with different attitudes and politics than his Virginia home. The city was drawing people from all over-whites, blacks, and an increasing number of immigrants-and Malvin, trained as a carpenter, surely hoped for one of the city’s many good jobs: building brick row houses, working on steamboats, or processing pork. As he traversed Virginia, then Ohio, law enforcement officials and rifle-wielding citizens stopped him to demand proof he wasn’t some runaway slave.Īfter all that, Malvin finally made it to Cincinnati in 1827. ![]() And yet, growing up in the South, Malvin faced the same poverty and violence as slave children. He was born in Virginia to a free mother and an enslaved father, which meant he’d always been free. His journey must have seemed longer still given that Malvin was a black man living in 19th-century America. John Malvin had come a long way to get to Cincinnati-hundreds of miles on foot, then hundreds more in a flatboat, floating down the Ohio River.
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