Walker's Texas Division C.S.A.: Greyhounds of the Trans-Mississippi (review)

This fine book will take its place next to other classics in the field such as Ludwell Johnson's Red River Campaign: Politics and Cotton in the Civil War (1958) and T. Michael Parrish's Richard Taylor: Soldier Prince of Dixie (1992). All of these books help to explain the failure of the South's war for independence as it played out in Louisiana. Unlike these other books, however, Professor Lowe's volume focuses on a single infantry division.

Walker's Texans made their greatest contribution to the Confederate war effort during the Red River campaign. In battles at Bayou Bourbeau, Mansfield, and Pleasant Hill the Confederate Army, drawing most of its strength from the Texans so ably described in this book, humiliated the Union invaders led by Nathaniel Banks and kept them away from Texas. Drawn back and forth by the contradictory wishes of the two rival commanders in the West, these Texans earned themselves the sobriquet, the "Greyhound" division. Their commander, Maj. Gen. John G. Walker, had served with distinction in the eastern theater of operations before assuming his command in the West. His Greyhounds were the largest single body of Texans to fight in the Civil War and the only division on either side that consisted, throughout the entire war, of regiments drawn solely from a single state.

Believing that the war would be over before their contributions would be required, these Texans had hesitated at first to join the army. When events proved their earlier predictions wrong, they hesitated no longer. In addition to protecting Texas, these men wished to uphold "the liberty guaranteed by the Revolutionary generation" (19). It seems easy to scoff at such claims today, but General Walker, the son of one of George Washington's staff officers, no doubt felt confident that he understood the true traditions of his people. His immediate superior, Gen. Richard Taylor, also took pride in being descended from both a Revolutionary War veteran and a former president of the United States. From the evidence cited in this book it does not seem that these generals, or their men, were overly obsessed with the issue of slavery. Through the course of their campaigns, however, they did return over a thousand blacks to bondage. In addition, Lowe ably describes how the Texans suffered from and perhaps instigated atrocities in engagements with black soldiers.

Using Walker's Division as an example, Lowe takes on a few popular misconceptions regarding Confederate soldiers. Employing detailed statistical evidence he demonstrates that the conflict cannot properly be represented as a fight instigated by the wealthy but paid for in blood by the poor. The men who suffered and died in this division represented a fair cross-section of Texas society at the time. Lowe's analysis of the numerous letters these soldiers wrote to their wives and children demonstrates that southern soldiers were in no sense the "insensitive patriarchs" that some scholars have clamed (49). Although written to elucidate a single topic, this book should prove useful to anyone with a general interest in the war.