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

Christopher Phillips's exploration of the life of William Barclay Napton through a wealth of primary sources provides a startling glimpse into the self-southernization of a northerner in the territorial West leading up to and following the Civil War. Phillips chronicles the life and times of Napton through Napton's personal journals, kept intermittently for fifty-eight years, and correspondence to his wife, Melinda. Within the journals, Napton recorded his time spent at the College of New Jersey, later Princeton University, his transplantation to Virginia and adoption of its culture and Jeffersonian values, and his settlement and life in Missouri.

Phillips highlights the "private civil war" fought by Napton, who severed ties to his modest Yankee roots and adopted southern values, including pro-slavery and states' rights doctrines both personally and politically. The discussion of his life in New Jersey in the first chapter portrays a cocky youth eager to distance himself from the perceived inferiority of the inhabitants of his hometown. Once he graduated from college, Napton embarked on a journey south that would prove an ideological as well as geographical transformation.

Following college and into his intermittently successful law career punctuated by appointments and elections to Missouri's state supreme court, Napton held Democratic political views that created difficulties in the rapidly turgid political climate facing southern secession and impending Civil War. In the context of his own life experiences in his position as a Democrat and a state supreme court judge, Napton recorded the challenges faced by Missourians in dealing with the secession crisis and the slave-statehood debate over Kansas.

Napton's cultural transformation from his northern New Jersey roots toward a southern ideology provides a vital historical perspective to this geographically sectional issue. The rich primary source materials allow the reader access to the private thoughts of this self-made southerner. His southern estate, Elkhill, complete with a vernacular and whimsical library addition, encapsulated his ideal of a southern-style plantation, including a large slave force, in the New West. Phillips keys in to his ultimate failure as a farmer: "Napton's farm never managed to produce enough to support his large family" (52).

Following the start of the Civil War, the two older Napton sons enlisted in the Confederate army. Their enlistments, along with William Napton's Confederate leanings, motivated home invasions and interrogations by the Missouri Militia, forcing Napton to bury some of his journals and records and question his ideology. Phillips focuses on his self-examination toward the end of his life: "He lamented that his ambitions had not been realized enough to provide his children the advantages he had intended for them" (113).

Phillips's familiarity with the Napton family and interweaving of anecdotes with established historical fact provide an interesting and thought-provoking telling of one man's personal history within a larger historical context. Napton's self-motivated cultural transformation in a rapidly changing political and social time in American history mirrored the consequences faced by a splintered nation. Through The Making of a Southerner, it is possible to understand the struggles of a nation within the microcosm of one man.