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A Broken Regiment: The 16th Connecticut’s Civil War by Lesley J. Gordon (review)

absence of slavery. This last claim is particularly problematic. First, it fails to address a substantial body of scholarship that has recast the Ohio River less as a boundary separating labor systems and more as a conduit connecting people, commerce, and shared ideas about race. More important, Criblez does not deploy any direct evidence of midwesterners defining themselves as a region liberated from slavery. He does explore the absence and, at times, forced exclusion of African Americans from Fourth of July celebrations (with the notable exception of the Civil War years, when black midwesterners very visibly asserted their presence). Such continuity in antiblack sentiments among white midwesterners is important for understanding the broader problem of race and citizenship, and Criblez effectively integrates it into his larger narrative. But what this continuity has to do with a regionally specific midwestern identity, especially in terms of slavery, is not explained. More generally, while Criblez shows that nineteenth-century midwesterners were patriotic, he fails to show that they saw themselves as Americans both regionally distinct and superior to those in other parts of the country. Today midwesterners like to think of themselves as the backbone of the American nation, encouraged quadrennially by presidential candidates who flatter the region as “the heartland” of old-fashioned virtues and patriotic values. Looking for the roots of a midwestern American identity, therefore, is a worthy project. By writing this useful study, Adam Criblez gets us partway there. Dan Graff