The Making of a Southerner: William Barclay Napton's Private Civil War (review)

Abstract

The Making of a Southerner: William Barclay Napton's Private Civil War. By Christopher Phillips. (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2008. Pp. vii, 162. Illustrations. Paper, $19.95.)Reviewed by Lillian Marrujo-DuckChristopher Phillips's The Making of a Southerner: William Barclay Napton's Private Civil War narrates the experiences of a Jersey-born northerner, William Napton, whose desire for political, economic, and social status led him to the slave South, where he fully adopted an elitist, paternalistic ideology and lifestyle. In the process, Napton committed to the protection of slavery as a morally superior way of life and, after the Civil War and the end of slavery, he became a staunch advocate of Lost Cause mythology.Phillips organizes Napton's life into well-researched chapters that begin with his early alienation from his father, representing his rejection of northern ethics, and end with the loss of his wife, representing Napton's sharing in the sacrifices made by the South during the Civil War. Phillips relies on an immense collection of primary sources, including Napton's detailed journals, numerous legal decisions, and family papers, all fleshed out by the latest scholarship on issues relating to the church, slavery, and politics. Phillips begins each new era of Napton's conversion with a set of lengthy entries from Napton's journal, most of which nicely illustrate the evolution of an adopted southerner's social and political views.William Napton's father, John, worked his way up to the position of master tailor in New Jersey, a free-labor state, diversifying his skills and opening his own business. Napton Sr. used his resources to provide his son with the best education he could afford, including private tutors and attendance at the College of New Jersey (later Princeton). William used this education as a means of self-improvement, but his learning was rote, lacking any creativity or originality of thought. According to Phillips, precedents of the past outweighed the realities of the present and the possibilities of the future, an important hint as to Napton's future leanings as a jurist (11). When his father's business failed and the funds were no longer available to keep him in college, young Napton went South, angry, cutting short his legal study to support by tutoring the children of a wealthy and influential Virginia family.In Virginia, Napton, re-invented himself (19). As the children's tutor, Napton was often included in the dinner invitations his wealthy host family received. So enchanted was Napton with the genteel South, so eager was he to be accepted and included by the elite Virginian society he was exposed to, he dismissed his northern college degree as worthless and attended the University of Virginia to continue reading for the bar. He also fully embraced the cultural and social assumptions of the oldest southern region, home to George Washington, James Madison, and, especially, Thomas Jefferson. Surrounded by the leading families of Virginia and their descendants, Napton yearned to gain entry into their society. Yet even graduating at the top of his class at Jefferson's university did not earn him the prestige he desired: He was not southern born, and Virginia's genteel, elite world was a privilege of birth only.Out west, however, Napton could be a founding luminary. In Missouri, Napton's entry into legal circles and marriage into a southern Democratic, politically active, and slave-holding family provided the groundwork from which he could pursue his goals. He married a young Melinda Williams, barely half his age, but with land as a dowry. The marriage suited him. Both Napton and Williams accepted an ideology that required women to focus purely on domestic endeavors, while the men engaged in the public contests of the day.In 1838 Napton was appointed judge, a position from which he could interpret and extrapolate the law. …