Press Release--LSU Press to Publish In-Depth Study of Civil War Border Conflict

LSU Press to Publish In-Depth Study of Civil War Border Conflict

Aaron Astor Explores the Transformation of Politics in Kentucky and Missouri

"This volume stands to redefine Civil War and Border State studies."-Anne E. Marshall, author of "Creating a Confederate Kentucky: The Lost Cause and Civil War Memory in a Border State"

"Fast-paced, sharply written, and deeply researched."-Stanley Harrold, author of "Border War: Fighting over Slavery before the Civil War"

Baton Rouge, LA-"Rebels on the Border" offers a remarkably compelling and significant study of the Civil War South's highly contested and bloodiest border states: Kentucky and Missouri. By far the most complex examination to date, the book sharply focuses on the "borderland" between the free North and the Confederate South. As a result, "Rebels on the Border" deepens and enhances understanding of the sectional conflict, the Civil War, and Reconstruction.

Astor contends that after slaves in central Kentucky and Missouri gained their emancipation they transformed their communities. Informal kin and social networks of resistance against slavery became formalized processes of electoral participation and institution building. At the same time, white politics in Kentucky's Bluegrass and Missouri's Little Dixie underwent an electoral realignment in response to the racial and social revolution caused by the war and its aftermath. Black citizenship and voting rights provoked a violent white reaction and a cultural reinterpretation of white regional identity. After the war, the majority of wartime Unionists in the Bluegrass and Little Dixie joined former Confederate guerrillas in the Democratic Party in an effort to stifle the political ambitions of former slaves.

"Rebels on the Border" is not simply a story of bitter political struggles, partisan guerrilla warfare, and racial violence. Like no other scholarly account of Kentucky and Missouri during the Civil War, it places these two crucial heartland states within the broad context of local, southern, and national politics.

Aaron Astor is assistant professor of history at Maryville College.


May 2012
344 pages, 6 x 9, 3 maps
ISBN 978-0-8071-4298-1
Cloth $47.50