ABSTRACT
This chapter posits that scholars of Civil War memory have neglected the role that regionalism and regional identity played in veterans’ reunions and the process of sectional reconciliation. Using Evansville, Indiana’s 1887 and 1899 blue-gray reunions as case studies, I argue that reconciliation occurred earliest in the sectional borderland of the Ohio River Valley. These reunions revealed an overriding reconciliatory motif of geo-cultural unity among formerly western people, as well as the aggrandizement of a euphonious “golden age” in which Hoosiers, Illinoisans, Ohioans, Kentuckians and Tennesseans alike were all “border men,” “middle people,” or simply “westerners.” Indeed, border residents consistently employed nebulous regional identities to “narrow” the Ohio River to suit the individual and collective needs of reconciliation. Regionalism, it turns out, could be suppressed or resurrected, isolated from broader memory narratives or integrated within it them in order to either facilitate the dominant national trend of white reunion or inflame continued sectional antagonism. I also allege that reconciliation worked hand-in-glove with locally and regionally discrete factors, including attempts by elites to control organized labor, build commercial ties to the New South, and use white supremacy–the nineteenth-century Lower Middle West’s long commitment to racial aversion, segregation and white supremacy through both legal and extralegal means–for hegemonic purposes.
