Missouri's Confederate: Claiborne Fox Jackson and the creation of southern identity in the border West

Abstract

Missouri's Confederate: Claiborne Fox Jackson and the Creation of Southern Identity in the West. By Christopher Phillips. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000. Pp. xv, 342. Illustrations, map. $29.95.) When he remembered at all outside of his home state, Claiborne Fox Jackson typically recalled as the ardently proslavery Democrat and Border Ruffian leader who, as the newly elected governor of Missouri, schemed unsuccessfully to lead his state into the Confederacy despite the Unionist proclivities of his constituents. With remarkable candor, Christopher Phillips confesses at the outset of his new book, Missouri's Confederate, that Jackson's brief moment of national notoriety insufficient to justify a full-length traditional biography. Thus Missouri's Confederate is not so much about a man as it about a man's world (ix). On the basis of exhaustive research, Phillips uses the contours of Jackson's life as a framework for the exploration of a number of major topics in both western and southern history, focusing above all on the construction of regional identity. Phillips begins by tracing Jackson's ancestry, following the succession of westward migrations that propelled his rootless and ambitious forebears from England to the Chesapeake to the Virginia Blue Ridge and, ultimately, to Kentucky. The same drive for personal independence, wealth, and status prompted Jackson, at age twenty-one, to leave Kentucky for the Boon's Lick section of central Missouri in 1827. Claib Jackson's early career as a merchant leads Phillips to a detailed assessment of the economy and society of frontier Missouri, while Jackson's subsequent entry into state politics in the late 1830s-he eventually served five terms in the state legislature-prompts an extended overview of the Second Party System as it originated and operated in this young western state. Similarly, Jackson's emergence in the late 1840s as one of Missouri's most outspoken champions of slavery and states' rights provides the opportunity for an indepth analysis of the growing sectional conflict and, in particular, the complicated process by which many Missourians came to think of themselves as southerners, rather than as westerners, by 1861. In the process of tackling such large issues, Phillips provides an engaging portrait of Jackson himself, who figures in the larger narrative as a calculating, opportunistic politician whose intense hunger for national office was frustrated by modest abilities that suited him perfectly to the pedestrian climate of a state legislature (82). Given that Jackson most remembered for his role as Missouri's governor during the secession crisis and the early months of the Civil War, it a bit surprising that only two of the book's ten chapters deal with that period. Phillips briefly traces Jackson's efforts to engineer the state's secession, but in its brevity, this concluding section leaves a number of basic questions unanswered. Most importantly, it remains unclear why a state electorate supposedly so supportive of slavery and so opposed to federal coercion of the Confederate states could so widely repudiate its procession governor. By the author's own estimate, sixty percent of Missouri voters in February 1861 either favored secession outright or were conditional Unionists. Throughout the work, Phillips skillfully interweaves three related topics: democracy, slavery, and regional identity. Like numerous historians before him-most notably George Fredrickson-Phillips struck by the centrality of slavery to southern white definitions of democratic society. …