Most Americans imagine the Civil War in terms of clear and defined boundaries of freedom and slavery: a straightforward division between the slave states of Kentucky and Missouri and the free states of Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Kansas. However, residents of these western border states, Abraham Lincoln's home region, had far more ambiguous identities-and contested political loyalties-than we commonly assume. In The Rivers Ran Backward, Christopher Phillips sheds light on the fluid political cultures of the "Middle Border" states during the Civil War era. Far from forming a fixed and static boundary between the North and South, the border states experienced fierce internal conflicts over their political and social loyalties. White supremacy and widespread support for the existence of slavery pervaded the "free" states of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, which had much closer economic and cultural ties to the South, while those in Kentucky and Missouri held little identification with the South except over slavery. Debates raged at every level, from the individual to the state, in parlors, churches, schools, and public meeting places, among families, neighbors, and friends. Ultimately, the pervasive violence of the Civil War and the cultural politics that raged in its aftermath proved to be the strongest determining factor in shaping these states' regional identities, leaving an indelible imprint on the way in which Americans think of themselves and others in the nation. The Rivers Ran Backward reveals the complex history of the western border states as they struggled with questions of nationalism, racial politics, secession, neutrality, loyalty, and even place-as the Civil War tore the nation, and themselves, apart. In this major work, Phillips shows that the Civil War was more than a conflict pitting the North against the South, but one within the West that permanently reshaped American regions.
DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "The Battle of the Rivers" by Edmund Dane. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.
Although the Creeks constitute a sovereign nation today, the concept of the nation meant little to their ancestors in the Native South. Rather, as Steven Peach contends in Rivers of Power, the Creeks of present-day Georgia and Alabama conceptualized rivers as the basis of power, leadership, and governance in early America. An original work of Indigenous ethnohistory, Peach’s book explores the implications of this river-oriented approach to power, in which rivers were a metaphor for the subregional provinces that defined the political textures of Creek country. The provinces nurtured leaders who worked to mitigate dangers across the Native South, including intertribal war, trade dependence, settler intrusion, and land erosion. Rivers of Power describes a system in which these headmen forged remarkably malleable coalitions within and across provinces to safeguard Creek country from harm—but were in turn directed, approved, and contested by local townspeople and kin groups. Taking a unique bottom-up approach to the study of Native Americans, Peach reveals how local actors guided and thwarted Indigenous headmen far more frequently and creatively than has been assumed. He also shows that although the Creeks traced descent through the maternal line, some became more comfortable with bilateral kinship, giving weight to both the paternal and maternal lineages. Fathers and sons thus played greater roles in Creek governance than Indigenous scholarship has acknowledged. Weaving a new narrative of the Creeks and outlining the contours of their riverine mode of governance, this work unpacks the fraught dimensions of political power in the Native South—and, indeed, Native North America—in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By privileging Indigenous thought and intertribal history, it also advances the larger project of Native American history.