History professor: U.S. still 'breathing the legacies of the Civil War'

The North won the Civil War, the South lost, and Missouri was somewhere in the middle.

Southeast Missouri State University's annual Harold Holmes Dugger lecture, presented by Christopher Phillips on Thursday night, examined the complex and sometimes contradictory cultural and political tides that emerged in the wake of the Civil War.

Phillips, a professor of history at the University of Cincinnati, explained that Missouri, and to a lesser degree neighboring states Kentucky, Illinois and Tennessee, comprised the murkiest of the postwar environments.

"Although we understand history in terms of definite physical boundaries, Missouri straddled both east and west boundaries, as well as north and south," Phillips explained during his talk, titled "Southern Cross, North Star: The Cultural Politics of Civil War Memory in Missouri and the Middle Border, 1865-1915."

His most recent book on the social phenomena of the "middle border" region has been 20 years in the making, and he explained that the perceptions we have about ourselves are sometimes influenced by divisions drawn during and after the Civil War in ways we often fail to realize.

He began the lecture by detailing how a caricature invented by newspaperman David Ross Locke largely defined the prevailing stereotypes of the day. Locke's character Petroleum V. Nasby satirized the philosophies of democratic, white supremacist "copperheads" and, by contrast, their Republican, anti-slavery opposition.

In response, democrats established their own newspapers with names like "The Weekly Caucasian," "The Vindicator" and "The Unterrified Democrat" to articulate their views.

"Take those bayonets out of the state and we'll show if slavery is dead or not," Phillips said, quoting one Kentucky obstructionist's writings.

In the period immediately following the war's end, "guerrilla violence was endemic" Phillips said, as opposing factions were forced to live side by side. He characterized the postwar climate as an inversion of a Carl von Clausewitz's adage: instead of war being politics by other means, politics and social sentiment became a way of continuing a war that had supposedly ended.

And since the overwhelming majority of political actors had fought in the war, many brought old wounds and starkly opposing points of view to both state and federal legislatures as both Republicans and Democrats were swept into office to further entrench the region in conflict.

Disputes over the ratification of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery, dragged on for decades, even after the required number of states adopted it and it became national law.

"Kentucky ratified the 13th Amendment in 1976. Only Mississippi was slower," Phillips said.

The fact that Mississippi ratified it in 1995 supports Phillips's assertion that "we are still, in many ways, breathing the legacies of the Civil War."

The combination of ideologues in public office and enduring bitterness among southerners, Phillips explained, was integral to the formation of a southern identity.

"In many ways, it's born of a sense of loss, anger, defiance, individualism and a historical understanding of a deep distrust of national forces," he said.

Phillips finished by examining the results of the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections. The map of states carried by Barack Obama in 2008, Phillips said, resembles with few exceptions, the map of states carried by Abraham Lincoln when he was elected president. Missouri went blue that year, but in 2012, when Obama won again -- by a slightly smaller margin -- it had turned red.

"Change starts at the margins, but is completed in the middle," Phillips explained. "[Missouri] is still a bellwether state ... it's always going to be a state that flips."

tgraef@semissourian.com

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