| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Civil War St. Louis. By Louis S. Gerteis. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001. xii, 410 pp. $34.95, ISBN 0-7006-1124-X.)

Civil War St. Louis roiled at the vortex of wartime politics, strategy, and social change. As the "gateway" to the West and a vital link to southern markets, the city was crucial to Union efforts to keep open river and railroad traffic that reached from the Mississippi Valley to Pennsylvania and to invade the Confederacy. The city also held a large cache of arms and ammunition at the federal arsenal there. But the great inland city of the nation's "middle borders" also mattered for its political and social dynamics. The swelling tide of German immigrants and migrants from the Northeast during the antebellum period had shifted the city's interests and loyalties from the old southern-oriented families and wealth to those favoring free soil and a modernizing America. Within Missouri, the city stood as the outpost of the new Republican party and of northern-born merchants and financiers eager to invest in a West free of the economic drag of slavery. And once occupied by Union forces early in the war, the city became a magnet for slaves running to freedom. Whither St. Louis went in matters of loyalty, investments, and race might determine the future of the West. Louis S. Gerteis understands all this. . . .

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