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The Transformation of Middle America During the Era of the Civil War

Both Timothy R. Mahoney’s From Hometown to Battlefield in the Civil War Era and Christopher Phillips’s The Rivers Ran Backward: The Civil War and the Remaking of the American Middle Border explore the disruptive effects of the American Civil War on the region that later became known as the Midwest. Often referred to as the “Great West” or the “Middle West,” nineteenth-century Americans viewed the region—including the states that flank or are located north of the Ohio River as well as those that border the upper Mississippi River—as distinctive.1 The authors are interested in the ways the experience of war transformed the region, although each defines the geographic and topical focus of his study differently. Mahoney is concerned with the transformation of the worldview of Mississippi River town boosters, while Phillips analyzes the development of the broader region, which he refers to the “Middle Border”, and describes how residents’ ideas about regional and political identity changed over time. Both view the Civil War as a watershed moment that resulted in the remaking of this important yet understudied American region.2 From Hometown to Battlefield in the Civil War Era describes the transformation of the urban Midwest and its booster class during the tumultuous decades of the 1850s and 1860s.3 Timothy Mahoney argues that, with few exceptions, historians have failed to address the ways that mid-century economic and political disruptions influenced the development of the American middle class.4 He explores the process by which middle-class families moved from a more traditional “hometown” ethos wherein personal interests were intertwined with those of the community to the emerging impersonal world of modern urban America. He wonders why so many men who were once ardent boosters of