Customer Reviews

Missouri's Confederate: Claiborne Fox Jackson and the Creation of Southern Identity in the Border West (MISSOURI BIOGRAPHY SERIES)

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Driving in Jefferson City, Missouri a few years ago, I saw a man selling Confederate flags by the side of the road. In the St. Louis area, where I live, this man would probably have been beaten to within an inch of his life, but to most Missourians, St. Louis might as well be New York City. In out-state Missouri, publicly displaying a Confederate flag does not seem to be an unofficial felony.

Why? Why did a state which began life and perceived itself as Western become the most Confederate state in America(as some of us like to point out, WE didn't surrender until 1882, when Frank James turned himself in after Jesse's murder)? In this biography of Claiborne Jackson, the Missouri governor who tried to take his state out of the Union, Christopher Phillips argues that Missouri's transformation from Western to Southern basically boiled down to the protection of slavery. Central Missourians, the people around whom this book mostly revolves, did not see owning slaves as contrary to democracy but central to it. Their families had owned slaves since emigrating to the West from Kentucky or Virginia. Threats, or perceived threats, to slavery finally drove segments of Missouri's leadership to a full-fledged Southern identity and led to Missouri's exceptionally violent civil war, which in turn fueled Missouri's fierce postwar attachment to the Confederate States.

This is both a good biography of Jackson and a good study of antebellum Missouri. But I do have a few problems with it. Phillips spends the bulk of his time in the Boon's Lick(now called Little Dixie another result of the war)among the slaveholding aristocracy there. Natural, one assumes, because that's where Jackson was from, but the rest of the state is neglected. St. Louis is paid attention to, but other areas of the state, like the fiercely Unionist regions of the Ozarks, are barely mentioned. And once the war starts, Phillips seems in a hurry to wrap things up; I wish he'd spent more time on the war itself.

Nonetheless, if you're interested in antebellum American history, this book is well worth your time.

Phillips obviously researched his topic thoroughly and has great insight into Jackson and the reasons Missouri found its identity with the southern states.
Phillips weaves his story masterfully. Well done.