 Wow what a rare opportunity and what a great gift and honor. Thanks Don, thanks Kathy, thanks Leslie, thanks Josh for all your support and having me here. I want to brag a little on Don for just a moment. He was part of a rare cohort when I got to Emporia State that made a real rookie into a good teacher. A decent teacher because it was hard to mess that up. They were that good, they were that dedicated and every scholar should have at least one of those moments in their career where they've got this cohort who are hungry and smart and eager and and make you better and I had that and I want to thank you for that because that was a great way to start a career. I've had a couple of moments like that since in other places but I think often back to that group of students and how they helped me in many ways to start on a path, a journey I didn't really know where it would where it was going so thank you for that. What I'd like to do tonight is to complicate I think our understandings of the Civil War in a place that when I first started working on the borderlands so to speak between North and South really didn't figure into an awful lot of Civil War scholarship. It was kind of ignored I felt like a little bit that I was howling in the wilderness but it's not that way any longer. The borderland has become central to our understanding of the experience of the Civil War and it's also central in many ways to the to the changing interpretations of that war that we've undergone in the last few years and I'm very grateful for the response I've had to the book after that many years of working on it it's nice to have folks who appreciate and understand the importance of what you've been doing for a very long time and also the complications within that the the incongruities that occur occurred in this place that don't have easy answers but they form an important component in how we are now understanding that conflict that really was not resolved in the way that we would have expected and that in many ways continues to haunt us even as recently in the last as the last few years and why it's haunting us in the lack of resolution and that's that word irreconciliation is one I actually use in the book to help us to understand that I'm assuming this is my advance right good all right so let me get started as if 1866 the first year after the reputed end of the Civil War had not been bad enough there came the latest dispatch from the Reverend petroleum v. Nasbi. Nasbi was a semi literate inebriate a one-time secessionist and a committed anti-war copperhead and he hailed from the rural north northwest Ohio Hamlet of Wingert's corners comprised mostly according to Nasbi of white quote truly democratic residents who claiming America for white men seceded immediately from their free state and then they resolved against black immigration and passed an ordinance authorizing slavery in northwest Ohio this is what they wanted according to Nasbi they wanted the garment revolutionized to keep New England which is spreading itself all over the West from submerging the entire Democratic Party our bark was on the sea slavery was its anchor it's jib boom it's right forward mast it's biosprit it's keel it's all is it can everybody hear me all right okay good rather than be drafted NAS NASB enlisted and then he promptly deserted the Confederate Army and he returned to Ohio to found what he called the Church of St. Valendigam and then he quit and of course that was the the great dissenter of the Civil War Clement Valendigam then he quit the state all together after Abraham Lincoln's and the Ohio Republicans overwhelming 1864 election victory after wandering several border states with divided allegiances he settled in Kentucky in a place he called Confederate Crossroads and they spelled it with an X which of course is a mark of illiteracy and he described this village Riley as quote the typical village in the unreconstructed south Kentucky didn't secede and therefore within her borders secessionists is safe thank the Lord for Kentucky if you haven't figured it out already NASB was a fictional character out of the fertile imagination of a newspaper man David Ross Locke Locke was a native New Yorker who moved west in 1861 and he began publishing his column in thinly Ohio not surprisingly in northwest Ohio NASB's letters became a wartime sensation and he gleefully skewered pro confederate and also pro-slavery sentiment in his adopted state of Ohio carried in serial form it became a Western Republican staple when introduced to the column in 1864 Lincoln reputedly claimed that had he the author's genius he'd swap places for the good of the country and he personally thanked Locke for having in his words stirred people to right thinking and decisive action what that meant was solidifying wartime Republican support and loyalism in October 1865 after the war ended Locke would move to Toledo and he would write for the rest of his life for the blade from 1866 to 1872 Locke's NASB's letters as they were known did as little to harmonize the west battered landscape as the war itself had his columns and the book's principal foil was the nightmarish racial and political violence that was unfolding across the Ohio and Mississippi rivers in Kentucky and Missouri worse even than that in the former confederacy these oil slave states exempted largely from reconstruction measures as now NASB mentioned and therefore I for free to defy them were perfect representations of the violent politics of southernization in these states but NASB's satirical target was the politics of white supremacy that rent his adopted state Ohio before during and after the Civil War indeed NASB's villagers sent in one of his writings quote a greeting to their brother brethren of Ohio with thanks for their prompt and effectual squelching of the idea of Negro superiority what he meant of course was the angry post-war racial climate and politics in Ohio that would result in the state's rescission of its initial ratification of the 14th amendment and the full rejection of its of the 15th amendment which gave citizenship rights including voting to African Americans Locke did far more than satirize simply satirized former former rebel Kentuckians and Ohio war dissenters or copperheads as they were known in the war and the post-war years he established for his largely Republican readership the individualist contours of white Southerness and what that meant according to him was and for Republicans who read him racial bigotry unrestrained violence democratic affiliation stultifying lack of education and blind Confederate identity and loyalty by creating a negative reference affiliation or a reference point in Western states that George William Curtis the editor of Harper's Weekly lampoon for his Democrats as rough scuff my policy and its insistence that government was created by of an exclusively for white men Locke confirmed for his readers the collectivist contours of northerness principled restraint from violence abiding respect for the education and the law support for the modern order and above all else the emancipation of slaves and the advocacy of the Republican Party so they defined what it meant to be northern and southern out of this war experience and out of the politics that surrounded it more than they were born into these sorts of identities for us most of us hold that the Ohio River is a clearly defined in a static demographic and political boundary between north and south that by distinctive cultures was and histories was an extension of the Mason-Dixon line the fixed boundary between freedom and slavery school children learn this scripture written as a binary that the south lost to the north and in prevailing narratives the Civil War rarely serves as a defining event in the history of a third region the West and vice versa yet this former West was central to perhaps the Civil War's most lasting outcome the cultural politics of what I call irreconciliation especially in these Western states or former Western states that would fashion discrete and often inaccurate memories of the winning and the losing of that war and that would establish the middle border as a front for a far longer war after the war fought for nearly half a century with inner peace and violence and politics formal and informal the Civil War changed the meaning of this border in fact it created it and with it the nation's regions as we understand them today unable to conform either to the emergent southern or northern war narratives after the war the battleground that was the West the former West anyway was effectively written out of the war and by 1926 residents had created an entirely new regional geography driven by these cultural identities northern southern and more complicatedly Midwestern and I'll try to tackle some of that maybe all of it in this talk I'm not going to talk about the war I'm going to talk about a different landscape a landscape that the war made rather than the other way around in March 1865 a federal commander in central Missouri's Western or slaveholding locusts along its Missouri River central counties wrote this slavery dies hard I hear its expiring agonies and witness its contortions and death in every quarter of my district accomplished by different mechanisms slavery's death in both Missouri and Kentucky triggered years of post-war violence and decades of war-driven politics a four-way struggle rage rage between occupying fed union forces freed people who tried to exercise their rights of freedom white unionists former Confederates or their supporters many of them disranchised who warred to limit those freed people's rights guerrilla violence was debilitating and much of it was based on anti emancipation pro-slavery ideologies far more than pro-Confederate ideologies it was debilitating during the war particularly in Missouri we know some of us know that story also in western Kentucky we don't know that story quite as well and it now became endemic in both states unionists in many communities called for troops to protect themselves and support civil governments while others beg to have federal troops removed especially if they were black something that would occur in Kentucky in the fall of 1865 and in Missouri the following spring well ahead of former Confederate states chafing under their defeat as one groused former Confederate guerrillas and paroled Confederates waged overt partisan and racial warfare throughout the former slaveholding areas of Kentucky and Missouri and they were scattered around the states where it was really dense in some towns ex-Confederates still in uniform murdered freed people and unionists and warned others to leave or die others proclaim their gangs of night riders to be regulators or Negro regulators or simply Ku Klux all of this was happening in 1865 and 66 well ahead of schedule as far as the rest of the south and they fired into private reds residences and they taunted unionists this is a quote some of those men say they intend to kill the last Negro soldier that comes to this county all and this is from western Kentucky all of this class of men are returned rebel soldiers violence in the search for freedom drove African Americans by the thousands to cities like st. Louis and Cincinnati and Lexington and Louisville were many organized with veterans to exercise or protect their fragile freedom rights black Missouri veterans as you see here founded the Lincoln Institute in Jefferson City while former confederate or Kentucky soldiers union soldiers African Americans were instrumental in helping to form or reform Berea College as a biracial institution much like Ohio's Oberlin College white solidarity took the form of appeals to join what was called the rebel democracy the pejorative term that loyal unionists used for conservatives as they called themselves or anti emancipation anti civil rights opponents in Missouri radical unionists swept into power in 1864 securing control of the legislature and acting a state emancipation ordinance before the war's end and passing a new constitution that disfranchised former confederates and sympathizers who were known again pejoratively as stay at home rebels racialized politics quickly built a state of self esteem the summer of 1866 saw the first issue of Lexington Missouri's weekly Caucasian and it became a leading national voice in the resistance against reconstruction the reconstruction acts by tying the struggle of local white conservatives and they called themselves that to the Ku Klux Ku Klux groups in Kentucky and also in the former confederate states these advertisements the editor ran openly similar white supremacist tropes called the angry western Missourians in the pages of st. Joseph's Missouri vindicator and this is a quote from the very first issue we are Caucasian in blood in birth and in prejudice in Osage County Missouri wartime unionists lebius zebally I think that's how to pronounce it refused to sign the loyalty oath required by the new state constitution and founded what he called the unterrified Democrat among the longest-running newspapers currently still published in state of Missouri under the same title and it is a hoot to read let me just say those Democrats have been a little more terrified until late so we'll see what happens in a couple months in Kentucky the ratification of the 13th amendment which ended slavery hung in the balance until the fall 1865 elections with 65,000 to 75,000 slaves still held in legal limbo many white Kentuckians in one words one's words enforced their ideas of Kentucky law by refusing to release their slaves until and even after the 13th amendment became national law and they employed all means of him's of obstruction to prevent them from gaining that freedom and this is a quote from the bowling green Kentucky resident take these bayonets out of the state and we'll show you whether slavery is dead or not in Grayson County Kentucky just weeks before the election David Clever Phillips witnessed the political assassination of a pro amendment candidate whose son served in the federal ranks after a speech in favor of the 13th amendment and Phillips wrote this it won't do to run men who has occupied his position at this crisis to command the union vote not just abolitionist vote old Grayson's right on this question I found that letter in the middle of my research and realized very quickly that was my Kentucky ancestor so I knew how he stood on the end of that war and it was a bit of shock partly because he was so open about it on election day many garrison commanders refused to prevent disloyalist former Confederates and even known gorillas from voting and election judges certified the votes in districts where secession flags hung inside of polling places defiantly rejecting federal authority and with few troops occupying the state to protest the national ratification of the 13th amendment in its December 1865 Kentucky's legislature repealed its four-year-old law of expatriation which had which effectively re-enfranchised former Confederates militant former Confederates swept into office by 1866 replacing the state's former union conservatives as they called themselves even former emancipationists quickly converted and former Confederate generals would hold the state's governorship for nearly two consecutive decades Kentucky would not ratify the 13th amendment until 1976 111 years after slavery's de jure and but that was faster than Mississippi communities throughout this region witnessed virtual reenactments of late war after the shooting supposedly stopped lines of self-described southern men exchanged shots with self-described union men often former federal soldiers while quote uncompromising union men along with black veterans and even peace-seeking former Confederates found themselves beset by mobs of lynchmen and as one wrote midnight intrusions no house is safe outside town at Russellville Kentucky Unionists suffered returning Confederates who quote in one's words dress and parade the streets in their Confederate uniforms fully armed with revolvers and constantly fire weapons especially at night even anti-emancipation unionists who fought back like this will kick you in the head Frank Fritz John Marshall Harlan who opposed emancipation yes that John Marshall Harlan that will cast the only descending vote against Plessy versus Ferguson he opposed emancipation as well they were terrorized from their homes he among them vowing quote that they had been treated like dogs by the people of Kentucky long enough many federal soldiers white and black struck back organizing paramilitary union leagues or union regulators midnight wars resulted as one frightened resident wrote with opposing vigilante forces often in uniforms quote trying all the time to kill each other they waylay the roads for each other as one recently returned Indiana soldier claimed when he got home from being stationed in Kentucky he said killing a gorilla is called murder in the vocabulary of Kentucky copperheadism the radical union men may as well dig their own graves if they haven't done it already politically by wide margins both of these former slave states soon rejected the 14th and 15th amendments and their national ratifications especially the 15th allowing black voting unleashed racial frenzies in each to defend white only government against what one Kentucky resident called the black peril meaning rumored armed what they called Negro Ku Klux companies many of them veterans who were intent then on securing african-americans right to exercise the vote for the first time from 1870 to 1874 battalions of what were called white citizens guards that sound familiar I bet it does they mustered into the Kentucky national Legion and fought alongside paramilitary clan groups on election days to prevent blacks from voting a similar if delayed outcome occurred in Missouri with the rebel democracy at last gaining power there in 1874 two years later during the national centennial a constitutional convention in Missouri overturned the prescriptive radical 1865 constitution that had disfranchised former Confederates and they soon like in Kentucky swept back into state offices and they would help to elect two former Confederates to the U.S. Senate who would then both serve for the next quarter century in 1884 a former Confederate general John Sappington Marmaduke won the governorship in Missouri across the rivers in the middle borders free states familiar yet distinct landscapes of war emerged racial animosity and violence were subsumed within war-driven party politics but these politics manifested themselves at the state level as fierce contests that mirrored their wartime divisions and in turn deep and political animosities that were carried over from the war unlike the states across the rivers or below them this political struggle for home rule soon became known if with different meanings as the bloody shirt at the national level Republican and Democratic congressmen used war wounds as weapons but Western Republicans also drew sharp racial limits to the Union triumphant trope often refusing to embrace even minimal political rights and social privileges for African Americans as former slaves surged across the rivers to these free states especially the cities and towns in border counties like Cincinnati most lower Ohio river counties saw their black populations double and even triple by the end of the 1860s racial hostility in these states portended a realignment of their southern counties with former slave state neighbors as the national debates entwined the laden terms negro question and southern question with K. Row Illinois once contraband camp now bursting at the seams with some 3000 newly arrived freed people the post commander there wrote in 1865 this the prevailing sentiment among the white population of the city is disloyalty to the government an extreme hatred of free negroes in Cincinnati the following spring the newspaper colored citizen reported attacks on black veterans by recently returned white federal soldiers all still in uniform meaning both white and black less to promote black equality than to torment Democrats Illinois and Ohio's Republican controlled legislatures quickly ratified the 13th amendment and repealed their state's black laws saved for suffrage prohibitions by a whisker Republicans in Indiana's self or decried copperhead legislature meaning Democratic legislature managed to ratify the 14th amendment without repealing its black immigration law making Indiana the nation's last former free state to keep racial exclusion laws on its books this all happened after the war the politics of sacrifice of federal veterans in particular many of them republicans led this new political warfare commanded by the union's great triumvirate westerners elissa s grant william t sherman philip sharden and confident that their armies rather than their eastern counterparts had led the nation to victory by a hardline style of war many returned home with deep enmity for those who had either not supported or who had outright opposed their cause that's a quote men cannot go through a prolonged emotional crisis and not pay the price admitted one elinom it makes people hysterical although prevented by their officers from exacting full vengeance on southerners meaning in the south as newly recoined lincoln's avengers they now abused former copperheads at home calling them home rebels and eschewing all affectations of reconciliation federal officers turn partisan republicans like elinor's robert g ingersaw in ohio's james agarfield and they told veterans quote every scar you have on your heroic bodies was given to you by a democrat federal veterans particularly those bearing wounds and veterans organizations men's as well as women's were universal presences at the party's political rallies helping republicans maintain control of state legislatures for as long as a quarter century voting like they shot federal veterans drew down on anti emancipation democrats who had espoused an idea that there was a loyal west one that was loyal to the union cause but was not supportive of emancipation these people denied that slavery had caused the war in protest of radical reconstruction in electoral warfare and virtually all republican candidates in these states at local state and national levels were themselves federal veterans many usually officers democrats are often were unable to contend leading one to splutter this 100 soldiers of the late war have more influence politically in any community than 200 citizens who never robbed henrys or masticated hardtack in range of rebel guns from 1868 to 1900 every republican presidential candidate but one had a military record five of them were ohio's the first being grant the federal war hero who was elected in 1868 by wide margins in all of these states as wartime loyalty offered currency for post-war grievances daily political warfare in local communities saw unionists men and women hurl epithetic terms rebel and copperhead at former dissenters to bar them from church membership and communion and those so inflicted responded in kind with words like radical and yankee local partisanship informed and not quickly manifested into insults lawsuits business boycotts and threats or of or outright violence singing copperhead songs as one ohio music instructor learned by anonymous letter quote will get your damn nose broke albeit you're singing and if i hear that song down goes your meat house i don't know exactly what that meant but it didn't sound good the message sent many were democratic veterans who claimed that they too had fought in blood for a just cause the union as it was and they returned home unrepentant hundreds of men died in post-war feuds that followed war loyalties in service or non-service because women actively participated in this partisan personal warfare they were little spared of quote female teacher expressive of the wish that grant Sherman and others would take the cholera and suddenly die was dismissed when she vowed publicly that she would not carry a union flag to the proposed picnic of the scholars but that she intended to carry a rebel flag imputing disloyalty republican newspapers gleefully published the names of local female recipients of wartime dead letters to effectively expose them as disloyal the 15th amendment put republicans in a defensive posture not seen since 1860 only illinois with its republicans conscious of the martyred president's emancipationist legacy and in control of the legislature ratified in indiana a controversial interpretation of the state's constitution quorum requirements allowed a vote with the democrats absent resulting in ratification and you know full disclosure the democrats walked out so the republicans voted without them in ohio the amendment met with outright defeat in the majority democratic legislature even self-styled western radicals opposed it leading cincinatis gazette a republican organ to conclude this a legislature could not be chosen in ohio which would adopt it meaning the 15th amendment the same state that lincoln reputedly claimed had in his words saved the nation after ohio voters had rejected the copperhead clement elval endingham for governor in 1863 while he was in exile by the way after having been arrested for giving anti-government speeches now it became the first state to reject the 15th amendment and by the way that contributed in many ways to the 1870 enforcement acts that were passed by congress war-driven politics fueled retributive racial violence in rural areas of the middle borders former free states where racial subordination was tradition especially during and after the 15th amendment debates just as in 1864 whites in washington county indiana had violently driven out all black residents of the entire county in wartime in the first incident of what one scholar has called racial cleansing in american history regulators or white caps as they called themselves increasingly targeted african americans for rough justice as vestiges of the war's emancipation outcome in the half century after the war's end white indiana vigilantes lynched no less than 20 after african americans many of these kukluxers as they called themselves proudly had migrated during or after the war from neighboring slave states one former kentucky slave nancy east living in middle town ohio which is a little north of sincenate remembered this she said i never heard nothing about kuklux at all until we come up here and i had them here she came from kentucky posies and militia on several occasions were called to quail mobbings and often met armed resistance from democratic war veterans their vigilantism now blended with war partisanship and in 1872 kuklux lynching of two white men jailed for rape near van wort ohio and van wort is almost a fortway in indiana clear in the northern part of the state near nasbys fictionalized wingert's corners not ironically members of that mob offered quote three cheers for jeff davis during the hanging in the years to come nearly three decades of what one historian is called commemorative separatism allowed cultural politics by discreet white southern and northern myth makings to explain the wartime sacrifice of some 750 000 people and by doing so they would complete the cultural border that would redefine this formal west into something else erased from the war memories were dissenters like clement elbal endigam remembered only by edward everett hails biting anti-descent short story man without a country and the majority populations of white and black unionists in the former slave states were also forgotten those who served in the federal ranks or maintained wartime support for the for the union commemorative civic rituals such as cemeteries and monuments veterans encampments and reunions as well as organizations whether union triumphalists or generally republicans or confederates and sympathizers of the lost cause all of these were constructed in this formative period after the war they were fueled by popular literature in the form of stilted memoirs and county histories and novels created and they created these mutually exclusive communities and counter narratives in which ohio and ohioans indians elinoyans were uniformly loyal and conversely kentuckians and missourians were even more uniformly disloyal and i put this image up um not because it's all that surprising uh to see a confederate cemetery but it is surprising that this is the newly renamed town of confederate kentucky renamed in the 1860s from whatever its name it had been before and so that is the confederate kentucky cemetery not just a confederate cemetery that's how far some of these places went to adapt and adopt that confederate identity in the half century after the war's end white residents in the west's former border land created this hard border that was accompanied by discrete inversions of prussian military theorist carol von clausius's famous dictum that war is politics by other means in fact in these states politics became other means to achieve thwarted war goals despite similarities of racial discourse and ideology that span the rivers white residents above and below them um for white residents above and below them the war's realities were appropriated to rewrite the war narratives to conform to the war's national outcomes petroleum v nasbys genius was manipulating cultural aesthetics to influence formal politics to anti republic anti-slavery republicans advantage the process of was at work in inverse in the former slave states with pro-slavery democrats the ultimate victors that there winning these wars took a half a century but they fully divided these former free and slave states that had once mostly fought on the same side in that long ago war supposedly for union western kentucky offers the apotheosis of the entwinement of civil war memory and the new southern identity at fair view kentucky the birthside of confederate president jefferson davis is marked with a concrete obelisk 351 feet high dedicated on june 7th 1924 an estimated 10 000 people attended that dedication including former kentucky unionists and federal veterans and they witnessed the dedication of what robert penn warren remembered he was a resident of that region as quote a faint white finger pointing skyward you can still see that faint white finger because it's very much there and you can see it for a couple miles away if you go the right direction only months earlier as that finger was nearing completion the local kukucks klan burned a fiery cross on the spires yet unpeaked top it's unmistakable physical and symbolic presence announced and announces that this former contested ground south of the Ohio river head and has been claimed for the southern confederacy and for the south among the many iris iris of the civil war as both presidents were born about a hundred miles apart in kentucky a state that never seceded officially but the confederates counted them as one of the stars on the flag more uniquely the cultural politics that appropriated this national binary spawned an entirely new region the midwest the post-war northernization as i call it in places like cleveland and milwaukee and in anapolis and especially chicago which benefited from economic nationalism as an engine of victory and transform the upper portions of these states largely bypassed the rural former butternut as they called them these rural residents who tended to sympathize with the south portions of these former union states meaning the lower portions of the states and particularly the rural ones rather than accept their rural areas as northern former dissenters in these rural counties waged an intense struggle over nationalism and traditionalism in them and in their region these rural counties became the epicenter for resurgent white supremacy and trumpeted their conservative racial traditions the second incarnation of the klu Klux Klan saw its strongest membership and national leadership in this butternut region and particularly in indiana where its national leadership came from progressives in small towns in that region like at uh kansas editor william allen white in emporia kansas where i used to live coined the term midwest specifically attaching tropes of pastoralism and social progress and independence democratic egalitarianism civic virtue all of those things associated with the midwest generally specifically to counter the image of regressive violence in these non-urban spaces of the free states former free states so rather than denote an absence of region as commonly argued the term midwest reflects a yet unreconciled in intra-regional contest over the meanings and broader outcomes of that distant civil war the stretching shadows of the former middle borders forgotten civil war have proven persistent and complicated exploiting historical events and understandings sports marketers employ border war imagery to lure collegiate sports fans to athletic contests between state universities in kansas and missouri and also missouri and illinois in which those in kentucky and now missouri are eager members of an intercollegiate athletic conference whose identity rests almost exclusively on these states former um affiliation with the long dead southern confederacy gorillas are included in this imagery this is an image of the burning of laurence kansas by william chrontrill and the term scoreboard says it all at least for this mizou fan so too in these states primary and secondary schools boast mascots or they did some of them are getting rid of them now with war-born cultural names such as rebels and cavaliers and kernels while above the rivers finds a compliment they find in some schools they're called rail splitters and greenbacks and generals and farmers at barredstown kentucky the federal hill mansion former residents of pennsylvania born judge john roan and the centerpiece of the old kentucky home state historical site is referred to as the inspiration for steven foster a sinton adion or a pennsylvania living in sinton adi to write his famous plantation song and this latter-day plantation as it's known today welcomes visitors to the state's genteel southern past including generous hospitality and an invisible narrative of slavery ironically of course fosters lyrics most of which are unsung as kentucky's official state song now was adopted in 1875 as such were inspired by heriot beecher stowe's famous anti-slavery novel uncle tom's cabin which was banned in kentucky in 1908 to be performed as a play what do the lyrics actually reflect in my own kentucky home the lament of a slave sold south to louis anna a version to culture a southern cultural perceptions influence public representation of the civil war and of the region north of the rivers in the 1990s the board of a north suburban sinton adi school district created in the 1950s and now fast-growing voted to build simultaneously two identical new high schools it soon faced a naming problem although the track the land tracks for the school's lay several miles directly north and south of one another the board chose to name these schools lakota east and west largely because parents in the southern district whose children would attend that southern most school pressured the district's board not wanting the negative cultural stigma of the designation south in fact this is what i what i found in the records was we don't want to be the dumb school is what one parent said from the 1930s to 2000 billboards in southern illinois beckon tourists to the state's infamous old slave house which was the former slaveholder john krenshaw's home called hickory hill they quickly came down when illinois historic preservation agency at last acquired the property that had long tried to get promising to restore it as a historical site and absolutely promising meaning in writing not to raise it the embarrassed state legislature of illinois closed the house to the public and it remains closed as does the most glaring reminder of the state's long-forgotten history of slavery in favor of the more appropriate appellation land of lincoln as travelers whizzed through Cincinnati only the elevated sign announcing the corporate home of the western and southern insurance company reminds them of the transitory nature and meaning of american regions and of the former borderland along the ohawa river crossing the river in lexington kentucky until very recently one could actually see the confederate statues of john hunt morgan and john c breckenrich only steps from the city's infamous former slave market they have since been removed as they have in other places traveling west crossing the mississippi river at st louis travelers cannot avoid the massive arch built as the gateway to the west one that frames the courthouse that you can see in the picture where dread scott was denied twice his freedom and then only miles farther west in missouri along i-70 they'll be greeted by signs advertising that they den they've entered the lixie the moniker for the state's former slaveholding river counties and and then since it's confederate renaissance in the 1870s that would then move to kansas city the state's confederate capital where you can find confederate monuments and burial sites plain view in the largest cemetery in the city the deep social and political divisions unleashed by the civil war have cast very long shadows in the form of over a century of extended post-war contacts over the meaning and legacies of that conflict more recently another legacy of unreconciled outcomes of a long distant war on the reputed border between freedom and slavery have manifested themselves as racial violence in cincinati in 2000 and 2016 in ferguson in st louis missouri and in 2014 and of course in baltimore before that in 2017 in charles full virginia the normally quiet home of the public university judged among the nation's best avowed conservatives or white nationalists including prominent graduates of the university of virginia bearing both confederate and nazi flags and vowing quote to take our country back tried to hold a unite the rally to protest the city's decision to remove the statue of robert lee erected in 1924 following the semi-centennial the civil war from a park recently renamed emancipation park used to be called lee park violence ensued when they were met with sign carrying counter protesters and armed national guard and perhaps the ordeal's most shocking twist the perpetrator of the purposeful killing of an unarmed counter protester was an Ohio resident recently relocated relocated from northern Kentucky recent evidence evidence suggests that many if not most of those white nationalists were in charlotte charlottesville hail from outside the old confederacy midwestern states like Ohio as were reminded painfully are not immune from the recurrent spates of populism and political and social revolts of white often rural small-town americans riven by race and class anxieties that have erupted throughout the midwest and the south such as in the 1890s and the 1920s and most recently in the 2000s following great recession the current spate of political passion over monuments in the former confederate states may be more directly related to the 2016 election of john donald trump is the nation's 45th president than that distant war but fueling the simmering controversy in bypassed or forgotten places like Franklin Ohio where there is a confederate monument or there was until it was removed and there was a controversy over it as you can see here this is a legacy of dissent over the loss of various forms of societal control long associated with union victory the civil wars continuing influence in the midwest is a shadowy warfare fought as racialized grievance politics and you can see a glimpse of this in the electoral maps from it 2008 2012 and 2016 which i'll put up this is a virtual representation with a couple a few exceptions of the of the configuration of states in 1860 and their votes for Lincoln or other candidates and by 2012 we can see even more retrenchment and by 2016 only two states of the midwest voted for Hillary Clinton Minnesota and predictably Lincoln's Illinois and mine and we can see how in many ways the west and the south or should i say the midwest and the south have in some sense in this election at least merged again in its politics together they present a stark picture of the current political merging of these regions and they offer food for thought for the importance of formerly sectional and regional politics that harken back to an unreconciled civil war in this middle region of the country though the problem of race is national the problematic history of the civil war is largely told still in sectional terms lines on the map are clearly drawn and easily understood as blue union states that fought the war for freedom and grave confederate states that fought to preserve slavery with few battlegrounds whether confederate monuments or civil rights sites residents of these states whether north or south of the ohio generally breathe easy about the complicated legacy of that war safe in the knowledge that former resident abraham lincoln ended slavery and with it the painful struggle for civil rights this is largely understood today as a southern history and burden that is until ohio ends like james alex fields junior and protests over the overnight removal of a forgotten 90-year-old plaque venerating robert e lee from its overgrown spot along a sleepy southwest ohio towns roadway alongside those in baltimore louisville lexington and st louis and the protests there have become national news and they've complicated this comforting story politics are destiny high and low social racial economic cultural aesthetic identity among the bitter fruits of the civil war and its aftermath in these former middle border states was a struggle for ownership of new definitions that mass successive unreconciled conflicts before during and after the war the border that now defined them was completed only after the political culture of sectional moderation was replaced with the angry cultural politics of region this former middle border that had long assimilated slavery and freedom into a western regional identity was vanquished by antagonistic cultures of slavery abolition and racial subordination under new names southern northern and midwestern but one of the most intriguing civil war monuments in the country stands in bates county missouri where in 1863 in response to quantrill's destructive as you saw on that t-shirt destructive raid on laurence kansas four entire counties were depopulated by the order of the federal government the representation of that order which fell squarely upon civilian shoulders was the opening painting that i had up painted by george palin bigham and it is clearly a protest painting of how the civil war played out and how that particular order played out in those four counties this is a representation of how the war affected homes and hearts and how it prayed upon civilians and in some sense it is less overtly political than bingham's painting but it is every bit is political but it also gives a unique view of the experience of the war in this region and how in some sense civil war scholarship is only now catching up change starts at the margins but it's completed in the middle thanks so much for your attention