Jeff Tweedy, turn-of-the-twenty-first-century bard of the Lower Mid-west, sampled imagery of the great New Madrid earthquake of 1811–12 into a tale of love lost and distance gained. “Rivers burn and then run backwards,” he wrote, a lyrical reversal of the historic temblor's seismic dislocation and brief reversal of the Mississippi river's course. If ever there was a place in the heartland of the United States where time and space danced discordantly, it was the junction point of the great Ohio, Missouri and Mississippi rivers at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The West lay ahead in America's future, but its meaning would take shape only at century's end, when the peoples of Kentucky, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana and Ohio symbolically reversed the courses of the mighty rivers and brought into being the regions we know today: North, South, West, Mid-west and, ultimately, Middle Border.

In one of the most conceptually rich books about the American Civil War to appear in a very long time, historian Christopher Phillips takes readers across this vast Middle Border from the late eighteenth century to the beginnings of the twentieth. Decades of exhaustive, painstaking research and deep thinking about the meaning of American regional identity make The Rivers Ran Backward essential reading for the study of the Civil War and, frankly, nineteenth-century American history and culture generally.

At its core, The Rivers Ran Backward is a study of race, ideology, politics and regional identity in the heart of a westward-expanding nation. Phillips fleshes out the early nineteenth-century vision of white republicanism that straddled the slave-free line. He emphasizes the extent to which white supremacy and defense of slavery defined the political beliefs of peoples on both banks of the Ohio river. In fact, while the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 forbade the legal extension of slavery into the territory north of the Ohio river, slavery nevertheless persisted in the region as slaveholders casually settled in and traveled through the “Northwest” into the 1820s en route to Missouri. Even anti-slavery movements that emerged in the Old Northwest were predicated on removal of the black population – or banning black entrance into states like Indiana and Illinois.

The harmonious relationship among whites across the slave-free line faced its first real test not with the outbreak of Civil War, but with the transition of that war toward emancipation. Missouri and Kentucky secessionists redoubled their efforts to claim their states for the Confederacy after President Lincoln embraced emancipation in 1862. Unionists in those states were demoralized by this radical turn and worked hard to stave off emancipation within their own states as long as possible. In Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, anti-emancipation Copperheads seized the political advantage after the emancipationist turn and briefly threatened the entire war effort in the Old Northwest. What kept the Union flame alive was anger at Confederate guerrilla depredations in Missouri and Confederate military threats in Kentucky. North of the river, it took the dedication of Union soldiers voting absentee in the field to keep up the war effort against “stay-at-home rebels.”

An explosion of racial violence in the war's final years forced African Americans in Kentucky and Missouri to flee to the Old Northwest, thereby exacerbating racial tensions in those states as well. At this point, however, the shared white supremacist sentiment led to political divergence rather than the spirt of compromise as in the prewar years. Kentuckians and Missourians embraced a vigorous Confederate identity, silencing most Unionists, black and white. Unionists in the Old Northwest heralded their region as the Loyal West, willing to save the Union at great cost – including contributing top generals Ulysses Grant and William T. Sherman – though with emancipation as a mere afterthought. Sectionalism produced the American Civil War. But along the Middle Border, the Civil War reinforced sectionalism for another century.

As he has done with earlier works, Phillips deftly intermixes vignettes and biographical sketches with his larger narrative argument. There are loose strands Phillips could have explored more – the complicated motivations of German settlers in the region, the importance of religious differences between Catholics and Protestants, and the peculiarities of the Appalachian eastern edge of the Middle Border, for example. But by maintaining a tight focus on racial ideology and regional identity across the entire nineteenth century, Phillips weaves a coherent, if complex, tapestry of American life at its greatest moment of crisis.