The State of Midwestern History: The View From Ohio

The State of Midwestern HistoryThe View From Ohio Donna M. DeBlasio (bio) In 2017, I became the editor of Ohio History, a venerable academic journal that began in 1887 as the Ohio Archeological and Historical Quarterly published by the Ohio Historical Society (now the Ohio History Connection) until 2004. In 2007, the Kent State University Press restarted publication, and in 2021 it became an online-only open access biannual journal. The parameters for publication encourage submissions related to "all aspects of Ohio's history as well as manuscripts on the Midwest that focus on Ohio or its region." During my tenure, there were several articles that connected the Buckeye State with the larger Midwest, including one on the cholera epidemic and Mormons and another about Ohio's Robert Taft and the politics of a Hoosier soldier in Korea. That being said, the great majority of the articles focus specifically on some aspect of Ohio history, often with little or no reference to its place in the greater Midwest. I am a native Ohioan, born and bred in that part of the state derisively referred to as the Rust Belt. In my academic and public history career, I've had the opportunity to delve into various aspects of the state's past from abolitionism and women's rights to the underground railroad to the iron and steel industry to working class housing and leisure to Italian American history, identity, and culture. As editor of Ohio History, I've learned much about the state that goes far beyond my own research on the northeast corner. Only recently have I been thinking more about Ohio's place in the larger narrative of Midwestern history, thanks to reading and reflecting on recent scholarship about the history of the Midwest. This renaissance of interest in America's heartland has enlarged my view and interpretation of the history of the Buckeye state and its place in the region. Ohio, the first state created out of what was then called the Northwest End Page 45 Territory (or Old Northwest) set the parameters for the states in that region that followed. R. W. Apple, in his essay on the state of Ohio in The American Midwest: An Interpretative Encyclopedia, refers to it as the "first wholly American state, the original thirteen beginning as colonies and the next three (Vermont, Kentucky, and Tennessee) having been carved out of them."1 The ideals promogulated in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 came to fruition in Ohio's first constitution, including the establishment of universal White manhood suffrage and the ban on slavery. Later Midwestern states, beginning with Indiana in 1816, followed suit. While a number of Southerners emigrated to the state, they were overwhelmed by New Englanders and New Yorkers who settled in the northern part ensuring that Ohio and the rest of the Midwest remained free territory. In the decades prior to the Civil War, the growth of the abolition movement found strength in the men and women of the Midwest. Ohio, which was home to the William Lloyd Garrison-affiliated Western Anti-Slavery Society, housed what Garrison referred to as the most anti-slavery county in the nation—Ashtabula County in the far northeastern corner of the state. Ohio was also home to Oberlin College, the first post-secondary institution to admit women and Blacks on an equal basis with men. Indeed, with the coming of sectional conflict, the Midwest played a crucial role in the Union's victory, providing manpower, munitions, and leadership, overriding any lingering Southern sympathies. Ohio, the largest Midwestern state, contributed over three hundred thousand men in uniform, which included five thousand Black soldiers. Several Union generals also hailed from the Buckeye State, including Ulysses S. Grant, William T. Sherman, and Phil Sheridan. Led by Midwesterner Abraham Lincoln, the President's cabinet included former Ohio Governor and Senator Salmon P. Chase at Treasury and William Seward at the State Department.2 It can be said the Union would not have triumphed if it wasn't for the Midwest. Following the war, four Ohioans who fought in that conflict became President of the United States: Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, James A. Garfield, and William McKinley...