Missouri’s Confederate: Claiborne Fox Jackson and the Creation of Southern Identity in the Border West (review)

Missouri's Confederate: Claiborne Fox Jackson and the Creation of Southern Identity in the Border West. By Christopher Phillips. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000. Pp. xiii, 342. $29.95.)

In Missouri's Confederate, Christopher Phillips has really written two biographies: one of Claiborne Fox Jackson, Missouri's secessionist governor; and the other of Missouri itself during its first forty years of statehood. Of the two, ironically, it is the portrait of Missourians' transformation from "Westerners" to "Southerners" that proves the more compelling. Phillips cleverly uses Jackson, an admittedly minor Civil War figure who died in late 1862, as a lens into the politics of regional identity.

In many ways Jackson was a stereotypical American figure, the young man on the make who moved west and amassed a fortune. Born in Kentucky in 1806 to a father who had himself emigrated west from central Virginia, Jackson came to Missouri with several of his brothers during the early 1820s. The Jacksons settled in the central Boon's Lick area, a region of prosperous counties lining the banks of the Missouri River. Claib Jackson married well, three times to three different daughters of a wealthy planter and entrepreneur, and one of the strengths of Phillips's book is his clear delineation of the less attractive facets of Jackson's character. He was openly, even nakedly, ambitious, the sort of man who kept exacting accounts of every dime spent in support of his stepchildren (and he expected reimbursement), and one who cynically turned against his political mentor, Thomas Hart Benton, in a bid for his own advancement. Much of the book is dedicated to the intricacies of Democratic Missouri politics during the 1840s and 1850s--particularly as they related to issues of fiscal policy, redistricting, and Benton's dominance.

Of course, one other issue proved politically and socially inescapable in antebellum Missouri: slavery. Phillips describes Missouri as a "slaveholder's democracy," and some of the finest sections of the book are those in which he traces Missourians' gradual identification with proslavery Southerners. Missourians never forgot the trauma of their bid for statehood and rightly felt that the controversy over the expansion of slavery in the territories affected them more than any other slaveholders. Missouri's slaveowners feared being surrounded by a sea of free labor and perceived attacks on expansion as personal attacks on their honor. While Claib Jackson was not directly involved in the struggle for Kansas, he increased his slaveholdings and commitment to the peculiar institution during a period of political exile during the 1850s.

Ever the opportunist, Jackson sensed that political winds in Missouri had shifted by 1859, and he announced himself as a Democratic candidate for governor. For as long as he possibly could, he avoided endorsing either Stephen Douglas or John C. Breckinridge for governor; finally, in a bid to attract moderate votes from St. Louis, he went for Douglas. That prompted a challenge from within his own party, but eventually he triumphed in a four-way contest, carrying 47 percent of the popular vote. Jackson's support of Douglas and the Union was short-lived. As the secession crisis broke in the winter of 1860-61, Missourians for the most part sought a middle ground, deploring both secession and governmental interference. Jackson took the latter as his mandate and battle cry and used it to articulate a particular Missouri identity, one that was explicitly proslavery and that located the state on the Southern side.

Jackson proved to be more Confederate than most of his peers. While Missouri, at Jackson's urging, held a secession convention, it was dominated overwhelmingly by Unionists, voting ninety-eight to one to stay in the Union. That vote notwithstanding, Jackson continued to try to maneuver his state into joining the Confederacy by portraying himself as the state's greatest champion against federal power and...