I would like to recommend this book as a corrective to simplistic conceptions of the American Civil War as a struggle between the North of budding industry and independent farmers opposed to a slaveholding South of great plantations and oppressed white poor. I would like to recommend a book that is the product of so much detailed and often correctly aimed research. I would like to recommend a book that gets so much right. I would like to recommend a book that shines a spotlight on a geographic area that I have studied intensely. But in the final analysis, I must demur.
Aaron Astor compares the Bluegrass Region of Kentucky with Missouri’s Little Dixie. Kentucky and Missouri, in common with the other border states of Maryland and Delaware were slaveholding states that stayed within the Union. Astor believes that so many slaveholders in both Kentucky and Missouri opposed secession in 1861 because they believed slavery as an institution would be, in the end, better protected within the Union than within an embattled Confederacy. Over the course of the war and reconstruction, these conservative Unionists were gradually pushed toward the Southern position as the war changed from a war to protect the Union and preserve slavery within its mid-19th century boundaries and became a war to abolish slavery and give former slaves full legal and political equality.
I do not have the expertise required to evaluate what the author says about Kentucky, although most of what is said sounds plausible. But much of what Astor says about Missouri contains dubious assumptions, over-interpretation of a few incidents, or even misinterpretation.
The first question is the relative size of Missouri’s conservative Unionist block. Astor recognizes that Missouri contained a great many Germans, immigrants from northern states, and Ozark whites, nearly all of whom opposed slavery. Yet he still looks to Missouri’s conservative slaveholders as the most important source of Unionism in the state, and certainly within the Little Dixie region. He asserts on page 4, “The vast majority of whites in . . . Missouri fought for the Union . . . most did so [because] they felt that the perpetuation of the Union was the only way to preserve the slave-based social order.” It is true that historians generally believe that Missouri provided over twice as many men for the North (100,000) as for the South (40,000). But thousands of the former were Black slaves and tens of thousands were Germans and Ozark whites who detested slavery. Significant numbers of anti-slave Germans from southern Illinois crossed the Mississippi to enlist in St. Louis Union regiments. There is no way to demonstrate and much reason to doubt that “most” of the “majority” of Missouri whites who wore Union uniforms did so to “preserve the slave-based social order (p. 4).” In a related matter, on page 176, Astor says that even as late as mid-1863, “radicals argued insistently—and erroneously—that most of the state’s remaining slaveholders were rebels . . . “. How does he know that they were not active Confederate sympathizers? No Gallop Polls were taken in 1863.
Although Astor mentions the federal tariff on hemp several times, he does not seem to grasp its importance to Kentucky and Missouri hemp-growers. The Confederacy was opposed to tariffs on principle. Hemp barons needed both the tariff and slavery to continue profitable large-scale production.
Sometimes Astor appears to contradict himself. On page 276n8, one reads that after the war, “Where white landowners still required farm help, they turned to white immigrants. Especially in central Missouri, where a larger German and Irish population already lived, wage-earning immigrants easily replaced the labor once performed by slaves.” But on page 165 we read, “. . . blacks remaining on small farms in central Kentucky and central Missouri found themselves in a favorable negotiating position with their landlords. . . . blacks held a monopoly over the labor necessary to grow corn, oats, hemp, and tobacco; . . . whites understood that blacks were the only viable labor supply.”
Sometimes he is not sufficiently critical of the source material. Astor reports on page 211 that in Missouri in 1865, petitions for black suffrage “ . . . included signatures from thousands of African Americans, even in interior counties; Platte County on the state’s western border offered 3,816 signatures alone.” But according to the federal census, Platte County contained only 3,369 slaves and free persons of color in 1860. After much flight across the river to Kansas during the Civil War years, the county’s Negro population had been reduced to 1,192 in 1870. Nor did the county contain any large towns in which freed slaves might have gathered. Since few whites in this rural tobacco and hemp-growing county are likely to have signed such a petition, either someone has misreported numbers or the original petitions were fraudulent.
Sometimes Astor is simply wrong. Four hundred fifty, not 150 guerrillas attacked Lawrence, Kansas in 1863. Astor says that after Missouri slaves were freed in 1865, “bushwackers . . . now used terror and violence to remove all remaining African Americans from the region” (p. 135). In fact, one of the less important guerrilla leaders did threaten to kill blacks who did not flee within 10 days and did in fact lynch one elderly man, but the black population of the county in which the incident took place declined only from 5,087 in 1860 to 4,038 in 1870. Similar declines took place in counties which recorded no expulsion threats. Astor’s assertion that after April, 1865, “The war over Union and Confederacy had devolved into a veritable race war” is worse than hyperbole. It is misrepresentation, at least for Missouri. Serious tension and strife took place between the races along with a level of violence that is much to be deplored, but ought not to shock when the level of racial violence we have seen in America down to our own time is kept in mind.
Astor does not acknowledge the importance of the Missouri-Kansas border war of the late 1850s as an origin of the guerrilla violence during the Civil War in Little Dixie. George Caleb Bingham’s painting “Order No. 11” is generally considered to represent opposition to a particular Federal war measure and the commander who ordered it rather than to “belated Confederatism.”
There are other problematic assertions, but enough have been mentioned to demonstrate that this book should be read only with considerable caution. ( )