The Making of a Southerner: William Barclay Napton’s Private Civil War by Christopher Phillips (review)

William Barclay Napton was born a northerner in 1808, but according to Christopher Phillips, he died a proud if defeated southerner in 1883. The path from his humble New Jersey origins to elite patriarchy in Missouri went necessarily through Virginia, where, Phillips argues, Napton cultivated a conservative political ideology that would forever mark him as a southerner . He modeled his life after the Virginia gentry, attempting to transplant the quintessential elements of southern culture and society in frontier Missouri, fashioning his home, library, and slave-based plantation out of Master Jefferson’s clay. His southern transformation would not have been complete , however, without the Civil War and forced Reconstruction. Phillips contends that Napton, like many white Missourians, “came to articulate their southern identity out of anger, resentment, and a sense of betrayal against a federal government they had long distrusted” (4). Napton’s story, then, helps us understand why he and other Missourians spurned identification with the Union victors and instead preferred to align themselves with a “Lost Cause.” After excelling at his studies while a student at the College of New Jersey (later named Princeton) and briefly studying the law, Napton seized an opportunity to leave the shame of his father’s failed business and become a tutor for William Fitzhugh Gordon, a Virginia lawyer and politician who mentored Napton in both the law and the social graces of southern gentry life. Privy to elite political conversations about state sovereignty , property rights, and slavery, Napton augmented his book learning with a life education (and a law degree at UVA) that he eagerly carried to frontier Missouri, where he hoped to build his own “Eden.” By 1845, he was well on his way: he married a wealthy woman with Tennessee slaveholding roots, acquired or inherited thirteen slaves, and built a small estate he called “Elkhill.” After briefly working as a newspaper editor and as attorney general for the state, he was appointed to the Missouri Supreme Court, where he served (non-consecutively) for twenty-five years. From the bench Napton articulated his burgeoning proslavery ideology, and by BOOK REVIEWS FALL 2010 89 The Making of a Southerner: William Barclay Napton’s Private Civil War Christopher Phillips Christopher Phillips. The Making of a Southerner: William Barclay Napton’s Private Civil War. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008. 176 pp. ISBN: 9780826218254 (paper) $19.95. BOOK REVIEWS 90 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY 1854 he firmly believed that, “Whatever may be thought or said of the evils of slavery . . . it is certain that the institution has the effect of ridding society of a great many evils which infest countries where free labor alone is found and tolerated” (54). Napton continued privately to articulate his belief that slavery was a positive good and spewed venom at the “Abolitionist fanatics” and their emissaries in neighboring Kansas. But to preserve his reputation (and salary) as a judge, he never publicly advocated for secession and buried his personal journals to avoid prosecution for treason. He could not avoid harassment for his proslavery rhetoric, however , and federal troops hounded him and members of his family during the war. His wife’s untimely death, in January 1863, and his ultimate exile in St. Louis in the final year of the war cemented his hatred of all things Union. Post-war rule by the “Radicals” only reinforced his resentment. Only in his waning years, after Missouri redemption in the late 1870s, did Napton find comfort in the “Lost Cause.” In fact, Phillips notes, Napton moved beyond his adopted Virginian roots and tapped into something even larger; out of defeat, he emerged a southerner. But Phillips’s last chapter, “The Southerner,” leaves the reader wondering why it took so long for Napton to become a true son of the South. He never defines what being a southerner meant to Napton or other “real” (non-Missouri?) southerners. Was it a privilege bestowed by birthright alone, in which case Napton could never attain the much sought after status? Or could one earn the moniker by embracing the South’s social and cultural norms, something Napton certainly did prior to the war and Confederate defeat? If Napton’s southern identity rose from the ashes of...