The border states in the era of the American Civil War and Reconstruction (Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri) are enjoying an overdue renaissance. Long considered a collective sideshow to the conflict’s main events, these slaveholding states that remained tenuously with the Union were torn over cultural, economic, and political allegiances to the North and South. Ironically, despite wishful attempts to avoid war, they soon became the front line of the “violent and remorseless revolutionary struggle” that in 1861 President Lincoln claimed he hoped to avoid by working to reunite the Union without requiring wartime slave emancipation. Post-emancipation, these states suffered years of redemptive violence that presaged Reconstruction. A raft of recent prize-winning books rightly offers these states’ wartime tales as protean; most of what the war became began in the border states.
This timely volume of thirteen essays employs a range of historical sources (with perhaps less interdisciplinarity than readers...