I've suggested several times on this blog as well as in a couple of my books that, during the mid-1800s, Missouri or, more specifically, southwest Missouri was where the Deep South and the Old West met. We had elements of both regions but we weren't fully part of either, but rather a blending of both. I've been reading Brooks Blevins's three-volume A History of the Ozarks, and Dr. Blevins, a professor of Ozarks Studies at MSU, makes a similar point, although he adds the Midwest to the amalgamation, an addition I don't disagree with. Also, he is talking about the Ozarks as a whole and not just the Missouri part of the region. That more encompassing parameter is on point as well.
Volume 1 of the trilogy, which I've completed, is called The Old Ozarks, and it focuses on the region from pre-historic times up to the eve of the Civil War. Right now I'm reading Volume 2, which is subtitled The Conflicted Ozarks. It's about the Civil War era in the Ozarks, including the time immediately leading up to the war and the aftermath of the conflict as well as the war itself. For the last day or two, I've been reading about slavery in the Ozarks, and that's mainly where the discussion about the Ozarks not being fully part of the South comes in.
As Blevins points out, a relatively small percentage of white residents in the interior of the Ozarks held slaves. For example, Douglas County had not a single slave in 1860, according to the census of that year. Residents of the northernmost and easternmost counties of the region along the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, where large plantation-like farms existed, tended to have more slaves. (Two or three counties just south of the Missouri River with large German populations were notable exceptions.) Residents of some of the larger towns in the region, such as Springfield, were also more likely to have slaves. Even those families in the rural, interior Ozarks that did have slaves rarely had more than two or three, and many had only one. Most families, of course, had none.
To be sure, most rural residents of the Ozarks identified with the South, supported the institution of slavery, and considered blacks an inferior race, because most settlers to the area had come from the upper tier of Southern states, like Tennessee. Yet, the fact that relatively few Ozarks families held slaves made the question of slavery a less burning, less personal issue for most of the region's population than it was for residents of the Deep South. Although they might have paid lip service to slavery, fighting and maybe dying to uphold an institution they had little to no personal stake in was a step too far for many.
So, Missouri and the Ozarks did not fully identify with the South on the eve of the Civil War. The fact that delegates to a state constitutional convention on the eve of the war voted overwhelmingly to remain in the Union reflects this fact.
Missouri and the Ozarks were at least as much a part of the frontier as they were a part of the South. In fact, people back east considered any place west of the Mississippi River part of the Wild West. Even in the years after the Civil War, newspapers of New York and other northeastern papers routinely referred to Missouri as the Southwest. Not the South. Not the West. But the Southwest, and that's a pretty accurate description of what it was, although, as I previously mentioned, I would agree with Blevins that the region, at least certain parts of it, also had connections with and was influenced by the Midwest. During the Civil War era, Missouri was called a border state, and that's what we were, in almost every way.
Anyway, for those of you interested in a thorough, comprehensive study of the Ozarks, I highly recommend Dr. Blevins's three-volume series on the region.
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