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The Loyal West: Civil War and Reunion in Middle America examines identity and memory among Union soldiers and veterans in the Lower Middle West, a previously overlooked region. I use the phrase “Loyal West” as shorthand for both the physical region, the dominant identity of its inhabitants, and the multitude of ways in which residents from the lower free states (southern Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois) came to reject antebellum conceptions of westernness and grew to imagine themselves as distinct from both Confederates and their African American and “Yankee” allies. The basic elements of the Loyal West narrative were, among other things, that western soldiers were tougher (especially vis-a-vis the Army of the Potomac), were more successful on campaign, were more willing to engage in destructive war, were less reliant on blacks and foreigners and liberalizing war measures, and that the West was the origin source of the Union’s preeminent military and political leadership. Although the major themes of the Loyal West memory faded with time, I argue that the Lower Middle West’s mutuality between racial and political identity, cultural memory, and social policy—white space, white memory, and white power—had great implications for the political and racial patterns of the late nineteenth and twentieth-century Midwest.

This history of the Civil War considers the impact of nineteenth-century American secret societies on the path to as well as the course of the war. Beginning with the European secret societies that laid the groundwork for Freemasonry in the United States, the book analyzes how the Old World's traditions influenced various underground groups and movements in America, particularly George Lippard's Brotherhood of the Union, an American attempt to replicate the political secret societies that influenced the European Revolutions of 1848. The book traces the Brotherhood's various manifestations, including the Knights of the Golden Circle (out of which developed the Ku Klux Klan), and the Confederate secret groups through which John Wilkes Booth and others attempted to undermine the Union. It shows how, in the years leading up to the Civil War, these clandestine organizations exacerbated existing sectional tensions and may have played a part in key events such as John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, Lincoln's election, and the Southern secession process of 1860–1861.