The Shattering of Texas Unionism: Politics in the Lone Star State During the Civil War Era (review)

The Shattering of Texas Unionism: Politics in the Lone Star State During the Civil War Era. By Dale Baum (Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1999) 283 pp. $37.50.

Baum is the foremost practitioner of the quantitative approach to the history of nineteenth-century Texas. In this study, he utilizes statistical methods, especially ecological regression, to analyze the voting behavior of Texans in key elections from 1859 to 1869. He thus explains the inability of Lone Star State Unionists to prevent secession, mount significant opposition to the Confederacy, or build a successful Republican Party during Reconstruction. Baum's use of ecological regression as a method for estimating relationships between the demographic and social characteristics of individuals and their voting behavior when only aggregate data are available owes much to articles that appeared in this journal during the early 1970s, especially those by Jones and Kousser. ¹

Regression analysis reveals that Texas Unionists (a catch-all term for the shifting and never-unified groups who opposed pro-southern stances on secession, the war, and Reconstruction) never succeeded in convincing a majority of voters to forsake the dominant Democratic Party--not even in their two greatest victories--the elections of Sam Houston and Edmund J. Davis to the governorship in 1859 and 1869, respectively. Houston, the most vocal opponent of secession in Texas, took the governor's office from Hardin R. Runnels, the ultra-southerner who had defeated him two years earlier, due primarily to a poor turnout by voters who had supported Runnels in 1857 rather than to any significant change of sentiment on the part of the electorate. Edmund J. Davis, the Radical Republican who had served as a brigadier general in the Union Army, received the votes of newly enfranchised African-Americans in 1869, but he won the governorship because many whites refused to vote. They hated Davis, but they could not support his opponent, Andrew J. Hamilton, the former provisional governor.

Baum's statistical evidence clarifies the results of several key elections during the years from 1859 to 1869 (Houston's comeback victory in 1859, for example), and it will have to be taken into account in future studies of the Civil War and Reconstruction in Texas. In a larger way, his work demonstrates that Texas, in spite of the many ways that it differed from the other ten states of the Confederacy, "failed to forge a history significantly dissimilar from the other slave states that had cast their lot with the movement for southern independence" (228). This is hardly an original conclusion, but it is one that will generate disagreement from those who insist that Texas was always more western than southern, that the presence of Mexicans and Germans made it different, that slavery was not the same on the frontier, etc. It appears, however, that the numbers, as Baum has used them, do not lie. The majority of Texas' voters, when they chose to go to the polls, made it first and foremost a slave state until 1865 and a southern state during Reconstruction.

Randolph B. Campbell
University of North Texas

Note

1. E. Terrence Jones, "Ecological Inference and Electoral Analysis," Journal of Interdisciplinary History, II (1972), 249-262; J. Morgan Kousser, "Ecological Regression and the Analysis of Past Politics," Journal of Interdisciplinary History, IV (1973), 237-262.

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