Aaron Astor. Rebels on the Border

The “rebels” to whom Aaron Astor refers in the title of his new book are not, as one might suppose, exclusively Confederate soldiers. Rather they include three distinct groups: Confederate guerrillas, slaves, and white conservative Unionists. Each group, Astor maintains, contributed to a “complex border state rebellion” that shaped national politics for a half century after the Civil War (p. 6). Not that this book surveys every nook and cranny of the border. Astor focuses on two clusters of counties—eight in Kentucky, seven in Missouri—that contained both the highest number of slaves and, interestingly, the highest concentrations of proslavery Unionists in those states. The clashes among the three groups, Astor believes, illustrate how the war turned conservative Unionism into a “belated Confederatism and a new breed of white supremacist militancy.” This shift, he submits, was “the great political transformation of Civil War America” (p. 10), and distinguished the border states from the rest of the South.

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