I’ve read with great interest the recent Ohio River Ramble series in the Washington Post on the nine hotly contested Congressional districts between West Virginia and Indiana. As the wonderful Post political reporters, Chris Cillizza, Chet Rhodes and Jim VandeHei have shown, this vast Ohio River Valley region is ground zero in the 2006 Congressional campaign.
In three Republican districts in Kentucky, three Republican districts in Ohio, two Republican districts in Indiana, and one Democratic district in West Virginia, voters will decide the face of the next Congress, and to an extent, the nation.
For me, this region holds a special significance because I recently completed a dissertation that, in large part, assesses the nature of grassroots politics in this very region – though in the 1860s and 1870s.
I find some striking similarities between the hotly contested Congressional seats of today, and the much more hotly contested Civil War fought between conservative supporters of the Union and conservative supporters of the Confederacy. Indeed, as today, the border state region along the Ohio River that divided free Ohio, Indiana and Illinois from the slave states of Kentucky and Virginia (West Virginia did not become a state until 1863, largely a result of these very internal tensions in the region) was a deeply conservative place. By conservative, I mean a reverence for the existence social and cultural order, a tendency to view radical political positions (of whatever stripe) with suspicion, and a healthy skepticism about the nature and intentions of large institutions, such as governments, corporations, unions, or banks.
It was this conservatism that convinced the people along the Ohio River to embrace both slavery and Union with the outbreak of war. And with slavery destroyed as a result of the war (and especially the black troops from Kentucky who served at a disproportionate level), these conservatives recast the narrative of war into a miniature Lost Cause. They fought for a Union that protected slavery, limited the Federal government and preserved white supremacy. And they lost that Union.
The only long-term winners were the Germans, who populated Cincinnati, Louisville, Wheeling, and many rural sections of southern Indiana and Ohio. These Radical Republicans dominated their respective enclaves for a century, with the remainder of the region in solidly conservative Democratic hands.
Today the ideologies of the two parties have largely reversed themselves.
Old-line Radical Republicans are now liberal Democrats. And conservative Democrats are now conservative Republicans. Yet, along the Ohio River, vestiges of the past persist enough to complicate the politics of the region, and potentially the nation.
Ken Lucas, a Democrat in northern Kentucky, shouldn’t stand a chance in the KY-04; that district may be the most conservative of all, with its mix of conservative German Catholics, Southern Baptists and outer Cincinnati suburbs. Yet Lucas, who held the seat between 1998 and 2002, is even or ahead of the incumbent Geoff Davis. In southern Indiana, this heavily pro-Bush region voted Republican Mike Sodrel over Democrat Baron Hill by less than 1,500 votes in 2004. Changing national fortunes in the two parties make it highly likely that this seat, home of Jeffersonville, New Albany and the rest of southeast Indiana, will go back to Baron Hill who, like Lucas, once held that seat.
And then there’s the OH-02, home of “Mean” Jean Schmidt, who barely vanquished the blogger favorite Paul Hackett in a special election last year. Her comments calling Jack Murtha a “traitor” did her no favors in this combined eastern Cincinnati and rural southern Ohio district. Like the KY-04, this district should be a cakewalk for Republicans. But this year it isn’t, as Vic Wulsin has shown remarkable strength following up on Hackett’s surprising campaign last year. Like Hackett, her stronghold appears not to be the eastern Cincinnati suburbs, but the rural counties downriver where voters, like their ancestors, support conservative candidates of both parties.
The stakes were obviously different in the 1860s.
Then, the Ohio River served as a border between free and slave, and as a buffer between Union and Confederacy. The unusually strong ex-Whig element suggested a bipartisanship that belied the generally conservative consensus of the region. Whites in southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and the non-German areas of southern Ohio nurtured strong social and kin ties with their neighbors in Kentucky and western Virginia. Just as today, the accent was the same on both sides of the river, as were many of the fundamental political values.
This hotly contested region, which blew up in sectional guerrilla war after 1863, is again the epicenter of a national contest over the nation’s future.
The Ohio River rambles into the past as it does into the future.