My Midwest
Hendrik Meijer captured well the essence of the Midwest in his review of Jon K. Lauck’s The Good Country: A History of the American Midwest, 1800–1900 (“Recovering the Heartland,” December 19). From its inception, it has been a region set apart. The Northwest Ordinance played a huge role in this, as Meijer notes. Aside from creating the Midwest, it precluded the expansion of slavery there. Given this, the Midwest’s role in the Civil War — Meijer summarizes Lauck’s case as being that “the Midwest saved the Union” — was no surprise. A conflict often perceived as primarily between New Englanders and Deep Southerners in fact required the Midwest to resolve; the ranks of both infantry and officers were disproportionately drawn from the region. We Ohioans count Ulysses S. Grant as one of us as well; he was born in Point Pleasant, Ohio, in a deceptively modest site some miles east of Cincinnati.
Comments