Historian's Unique Approach Leads to Appearance in PBS Documentary

When Christopher Phillips appears next week in the PBS documentary series,

American Experience

, he will comment on the outlaw Jesse James, who is the focus of the episode. He believes that James’ “thirst for violence was in fact a war-born thirst for vengeance against northerners and a federal government that represented those interests.” For Phillips, James is just one example of the bitter post-Civil War political division that eventually altered Missouri’s regional identity and led to its becoming part of 21st century “red country.”

His 2000 book,

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

, caught historians’ attention because it departed from prevailing scholarly assumptions about national state alignments by contending that the “southernization” of Missouri was triggered not by its identification with the South’s plantation culture but was rather a means of reestablishing local jurisdiction in defiance of federal authority in the aftermath of the war. If that was the case, James is less interesting as a bandit than as a “postwar cold warrior in the complex process by which Missouri westerners became and remain Missouri southerners.”

The theme of southernization of the western border also informs Phillips’ latest manuscript, tentatively titled

Shades of Gray: The Civil War on the Middle Border and the Creation of American Regionalism

. In this work, which is under contract to Oxford University Press, he examines the deep divisions within the border slave states that remained loyal to the North but ultimately became part of the South politically and ideologically. Like Missourians, Kentuckians transformed their politics and identity largely in response to the wartime end of slavery and in opposition to Congress’ implementation of civil rights for former slaves. In so doing, they aligned themselves with the former Confederate states and identified with their experience. Phillips argues that such regional identity is ultimately more political than cultural.

The conclusion he draws might have amused Jesse James: “Ironically, the famed Mason-Dixon Line is anything but a border between North and South in modern America. One of the most quixotic legacies of the Civil War is that while the border slave states east of the Appalachian Mountains grew more northern after the war, the same such states west of the mountains, Kentucky and Missouri, became decidedly southern. Thus in the end, the victorious North created a larger South than the defeated Confederacy could accomplish for itself.”

As for the historical fate of James, he says he was “shocked” to learn that 90% of respondents to an interactive PBS poll consider him something of a folk hero whose crimes, which included robbery and murder, were justified. This is in spite of the fact that a recent James biographer, who drew on Phillips’ interpretations, referred to him as a “terrorist.” But that wasn’t the only surprise the historian encountered as a result of his involvement with the James’ saga.

He explains that PBS interviewed him by telephone and a few months later flew him to New York to participate in the documentary. “As enjoyable as it was, it was a difficult hour of filming,” recalls Phillips. He was not informed beforehand of the questions he would be asked because the director/producer assured him he wanted spontaneous answers. Then just as the cameras were ready to roll, he was told, “No pressure, but we use film and not tape, which is expensive, so get it right the first time.”

Phillips thinks that having survived nearly twenty years of wartime and postwar bushwhacking and robbery across several states, Jesse James might have liked knowing that he wasn’t alone in being called upon to do split-second improvisations.

The PBS episode in which Phillips appears will air on WCET, at 9 PM EDT on February 6

.