About the Author

Christopher Phillips is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Cincinnati. He is the co-editor of The Union on Trial: The Political Journals of Judge William Barclay Napton, 1829-1883 and author of Damned Yankee: The Life of General Nathaniel Lyon and Freedom's Port: The African American Community of Baltimore, 1790-1860.

Reviews

"Christopher Phillips has written about people named Marmaduke, Sappington, Thomas Hart Benton, and 'the Fox, ' about places like The Boon's Lick, about a horse named Duke Sumner. And he tells good stories. But this book is about nationality, culture, imagination, and identity. This is an important work of mature scholarship."--Emory M. Thomas

"More than a biography, this book about Missouri's secessionist governor analyzes the antebellum socioeconomic and political history of a state both literally and figuratively on the border-between North and South, East and West, freedom and slavery, modernity and tradition. The reader will come away with enhanced understanding of why Missouri suffered a vicious civil war within the larger Civil War."--James M. McPherson