Going Over the River: On the Making and Unmaking of Borders

By Andrew R.L. Cayton
Miami University


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Forgive me for starting on a personal note but the fact is that preparing these remarks has made me
feel, well, old. The cause of this sudden attack of antiquity at the not really so advanced age of 52
is my inability to forget my one and only other trip to The Filson.

It was the late 1970s and I was in Louisville to check out one of the archives that I thought might provide the evidentiary foundation for the dissertation I was planning to write at Brown University. At that early point in my research, flush from having survived my field examinations, I was imagining a grand thesis that would deal with the history of the drainage area of the Ohio River—that is, the region north and south of the river, from Pittsburgh to the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi—in the half-century after the American Revolution. 

While my day at The Filson itself went well, the drive back to my grandparents’ home in Covington, Kentucky, did not. Concluding that my reach was exceeding my grasp, I decided to scale back my project, mainly in reaction to two sources of caution. First, my wife was right to warn me away from religion; in spite of, or perhaps because of my occasional relationship with the Disciples of Christ—the denomination to which my Kentucky family had been loyal since at least the 1820s—I didn’t “get” religion and couldn’t understand the spirit of spirituality. Second, and more troubling, was the Ohio River itself and what it still represented to me. I realized that except for a couple of short trips to Madison when I was a child I had never been in Indiana. Hardly a reason to despair, I grant you, but a little strange for someone born in Cincinnati to Kentucky parents whose families had lived for generations in Boone, Kenton and Gallatin counties. 

The stories I had heard and learned to tell growing up in northern Kentucky always described the Ohio River as a border that separated us from the people who lived on the other side. This indisputable fact was central to our construction of who we were. Our “sense of place” was, as Albert Camus wrote in 1955, “not just something that [we knew and felt], it [was] something [we did].” To be sure whLouisville Muncipal Bridge later named George Rodgers Clark Memorial Bridgeen I was growing up in Covington, my grandmothers worked in department stores in Cincinnati and my father at the University of Cincinnati. I and my maternal grandfather—who was proud of nothing more than his M.A. in History from Miami University—spent many muggy nights in Crosley Field watching the Reds. My family shopped in downtown Cincinnati, read newspapers published in Cincinnati and watched television stations located in Cincinnati. But somehow we who lived no more than a couple of miles south of the river assumed that Cincinnati constituted a different place. When my mother announced that she was taking my four sisters and me “over the river” to visit a doctor, she dressed us up in our Sunday best. It was an occasion to anticipate and to remember. Ohio was most definitely not Kentucky, although I didn’t grasp exactly how until I was old enough to see that my father’s decision to give his son the middle names of Robert Lee in that pivotal month of May 1954 was a political statement by an unreconstructed Democrat—a Democrat, that is, until 1964. 

By the time I got to my grandparents my local knowledge had trumped my professional training. It made no sense, I thought, to see the Ohio Valley as a whole. Indeed, I was most interested in how the river became a border, and more generally, in why political borders created at the end of the end of the eighteenth century had come to matter so much to so many people in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. My dissertation became about the political transformation of the Ohio Country into the Northwest Territory and then into the state of Ohio. In retrospect, it was not a bad idea. But what I wrote was a limited, teleological narrative about the origins of an arbitrary political entity called an American state, an enterprise founded on the assumption that I could understand why the Ohio River was a border by focusing on the words and actions of the white men who acquired, contested and exercised a form of political power that I implicitly believed was permanent. Never in the entire drive from Louisville to Covington did I think about native peoples, women or African Americans. 

Although I was blissfully unaware of it, my choice to write about the emergence of political borders was out of step with the major cultural and intellectual developments of the late-twentieth century that have led us here today to this place, to this conference and to my second encounter with The Filson. The democratization of the academy, which mirrored the democratization of the scholars placed native peoples as well as French, Hispanic, metís and mestizos at the center of their stories. They broadened out from politics, diplomacy and religion to encompass gender, race, sexuality, labor and a host of other important issues. And to one degree or another they used the study of borderlands to defy the hegemony of celebratory national narratives. One of their major themes was resistance to borders enforced by the liberal nation-states that triumphed around the world in the nineteenth century, borders defined by an insistence on universal conformity to abstract and bureaucratic notions of undifferentiated mass citizenship rather than loyalty to United States, was breaking up the community of white, mainly Protestant and mostly heterosexual men trained in the northeast—that is, guys like me— empowering myriad peoples who felt excluded or alienated from the American “mainstream” to write their own histories. 

Frontiers in particular fascinated many members of this new generation of scholars because they were increasingly defined as places without borders. By the late 1970s, several historians—including our distinguished colleague David Weber—had already embarked on careers that taken together transformed frontiers into borderlands. Unlike me, these scholars placed native peoples as well as French, Hispanic, metís and mestizos at the center of their stories. They broadened out from politics, diplomacy and religion to encompass gender, race, sexuality, labor and a host of other important issues. And to one degree or another they used the study of borderlands to defy the hegemony of celebratory national narratives. One of their major themes was resistance to borders enforced by the liberal nation-states that triumphed around the world in the nineteenth century, borders defined by an insistence on universal conformity to abstract and bureaucratic notions of undifferentiated mass citizenship rather than loyalty to kinship, commercial or religious networks. Because territorial borders are legal fictions at odds with fluid cultural and commercial networks, the “negotiation of borders includes both the practical negotiations involved in crossborder transfers of people and goods, as well as the more abstract negotiations over meaning to which these activities, among others, give rise.”1 

This theme will dominate our discussions. Philip Mulder will start by suggesting that borderlands were places “where imperial designs to impose religious wills were modified, adjusted and absorbed into complex interactions, negotiations and compromises.” Rebekah Mergenthal will discuss “line crossing” in defiance or ‘oppositional’ narrative centered on intercultural conflict with new emphases on political accommodation and cultural hybridity.” These papers skillfully reinforce and smartly develop the major theme of borderlands scholarship: the significance of instability in encouraging resistance to power. Whether in scholarship, politics or personal preferences, everything is permeable, nothing is permanent, and all borders—political, intellectual and cultural—are historically constructed and intrinsically transient. This epistemological revolution has immeasurably enriched us in no small part by making theoretical questions and interpretive models more central to our conversations than local knowledge. Where scholars of Florida and Quebec might once have struggled to converse because they were interested in different places, some now find common ground in delineating the extent to which borders were legal fictions created and maintained to support the interests of a few at the expense of many. Much as I admire—and haLouisville Muncipal Bridge. Louisville, KY skyline in the late 1930’s to early 1940’sve participated in—this approach to the study of the past, I worry that in our commendable eagerness to think about larger patterns of human behavior, we tend to ignorance of unenforceable borders. Kathleen Duval sees borderlands as contested spaces that “particularly in wartime, allowed for surprising freedoms and powers within slavery and mutual dependence and even allegiance between the agents of colonialism and its victims.” Borderlands, according to Julie Winch, “could represent galling restrictions or they could hold the promise of limitless opportunities.” Daniel Murphree will tell us how “[e]mphasis on nation states, imperial hegemons and single culture individuals has decreased while hybrid communities, culture brokers and ‘go-betweens’ [have] increasingly receive more attention.” Recent historians, Rob Harper will tell us in sum, have “replaced an ‘oppositional’ narrative centered on intercultural conflict with new emphases on political accommodation and cultural hybridity.” 

These papers skillfully reinforce and smartly develop the major theme of borderlands scholarship: the significance of instability in encouraging resistance to power. Whether in scholarship, politics or personal preferences, everything is permeable, nothing is permanent, and all borders—political, intellectual and cultural—are historically constructed and intrinsically transient. This epistemological revolution has immeasurably enriched us in no small part by making theoretical questions and interpretive models more central to our conversations than local knowledge. Where scholars of Florida and Quebec might once have struggled to converse because they were interested in different places, some now find common ground in delineating the extent to which borders were legal fictions created and maintained to support the interests of a few at the expense of many. 

Much as I admire—and have participated in—this approach to the study of the past, I worry that in our commendable eagerness to think about larger patterns of human behavior, we tend to slight place, by which I mean particular configurations of peoples and animals in particular environments in particular times. In other words, places differ, whether materially or cognitively, whether in the present or in the past. They are not the same if only because significant numbers of people don’t believe they’re the same. My grandfather’s reaction to the idea of the Ohio River as a borderland rather than as a border would have been to chuckle at the ignorance of the person speaking, as if anyone could doubt the extent to which who we were and always had been was decisively shaped by the fact that we lived on the south side of the river. How many times did he tell me as he maneuvered his car on to the Suspension Bridge to be careful because we just didn’t know what might happen in Cincinnati. If he was speaking vaguely about his attitudes toward African Americans and the rapid transformation of urban areas in the middle of the twentieth century, he was also saying that the rules were somehow different north of the river in ways he simply couldn’t explain to me. In short, notwithstanding daily commercial and cultural crossings, the border between Kentucky and Ohio, whatever its origins, was very real to significant numbers of people (and especially to black families, I suspect) because they thought it was real, indeed needed it to be real. As Tyler Boulware will argue, “cultural ambiguities in the contested regions of America were commonplace . . . [but] political and ideological allegiances were very apparent to peoples on both sides of the border.” 

The Ohio River as a border, in short, provided a central, stable foundation around which many people from the early-nineteenth through the late-twentieth century organized the concrete stories in which they located themselves in space and time. It is in this spirit that I caution against too much comparison of places that may seem to have more in common than they actually did. Which is not to argue that we should revel in our uniqueness and study only those places in whose construction we regularly participate, although that in fact is what most of us actually do. Rather, I’d encourage us to continue on the path of many World Historians toward an integration of the multiple stories of multiple places into larger narratives, narratives that emphasize not so much what the valleys of the Ohio and the Rio Grande had/have in common as the ways in which their histories have intersected with each other. In other words, to pay attention to time as well as to place, to write about both the making and unmaking of borders on the ground as well as in distant capitals. 

The ultimate goal would be to think about how the contingent histories of disparate places unfolded in real time in very specific relationships with each other. It would be to move beyond telling stories that amount to variations on the theme of resistance to power and to write intersecting global stories about the acquisition, nature, exercise and loss of power. In the end, I suppose, if I no longer contemplate writing the kind of narrow political history I chose to write after my first visit to The Filson, if I am even more eager to consider new ideas that will destabilize my perpetually unstable sense of the past, I cannot escape the problems that preoccupied me 30 years ago. You can dress me up and take me “over the river” to new and different places, in other words, but I will still be looking for answers to the same old questions. • 

 

1. Thomas M. Wilson and Hastings Donnan, “Nation, State and Identity at International Borders,” in Border Identities: Nation and State as International Frontiers, ed. Wilson and Donnan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 21.

Volume 6, Number 4

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