The Yankee Invasion of Texas (review)

Over the past two decades, professors and students from the University of North Texas have carved out an impressive record of scholarly research and publication in the fields of nineteenth century Southern, Texas, and Civil War history. In his The Yankee Invasion of Texas, University of North Texas alumnus Stephen A. Townsend has written the first scholarly monograph to focus specifically on the North's Rio Grande expedition of 1863–64. In so doing, Townsend places these events in the larger contexts of Pres. Abraham Lincoln's determination to limit both the lucrative cotton trade that had emerged in wartime South Texas and a possible Franco-Confederate alliance stemming from Maximilian's imperialist regime in Mexico. As an added benefit, such a Union thrust might have established a friendly provisional government and taken most of Texas out of the Confederacy.

Tasked with planting the Union flag in Confederate Texas, Maj. Gen. Nathaniel P. Banks and the lead elements of what was to become an army of some ten thousand men scrambled ashore near the mouth of the Rio Grande in November 1863. Overrunning light Confederate resistance, Union troops captured Brownsville, moved up the Texas coast past Corpus Christi as far as Matagorda Island, and probed upriver to Rio Grande City. By year's end, however, Union advances had stalled. As Confederates gathered strength for a counterattack, Union forces in South Texas, depleted by demands in other theaters, abandoned their gains save for a small detachment at Brazos Santiago. Continuing skirmishes, diplomatic and military gambits related to the Imperialist-Juarista struggle for control of Mexico, the lingering presence of the controversial Juan Cortina, and the battle of Palmito Ranch marked the remainder of the regional conflict. The invasion, in Townsend's view, had nonetheless yielded many benefits to the North. French intervention had been discouraged, the cotton trade temporarily disrupted, a military government under Andrew J. Hamilton established, and morale among Confederate Texans badly shaken. Townsend, however, suggests that the Rio Grande invasion could—and, at least implicitly, should—have dealt Texas a more grievous blow. In contrast to most previous scholars, he blames this failure not on the heroics of renowned Confederate stalwarts such as John S. "Rip" Ford, or even the much-criticized Banks, but on the exploits of the more shadowy Henry Halleck, whose "obsession with the Red River route into Texas undermined the possible success of the Rio Grande expedition" (p. 146).

Crisply written and well-researched, The Yankee Invasion of Texas tells an important and interesting story about as well as it can be told. By necessity, Townsend focuses on political, diplomatic, and military events, for the deplorable state of record keeping in Confederate South Texas by the third year of the war probably makes it impossible to engage in any systematic quantitative analysis of either the invasion's impact on the people of South Texas, or of the precise magnitude of the cotton trade through Mexico. Thus, students of the war outside of Texas will still wonder whether the dispatch of so many troops to a region far from the fields of Virginia or Georgia made good strategic sense at this stage in the conflict.