Texas Confederate, Reconstruction Governor: James Webb Throckmorton (review)

2010Book Reviews413 population trends of specific areas of northern Mexico between 1830 and 1846? How long did the settlements that George Ruxton and others reported deserted due to Indian depredations remain abandoned? Did Texans and others oppose Article 1 1 of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo merely because they "appreciated how difficult it would be to prevent Indian raids into Mexico" (295), or did they harbor commercial and political interests in the continuation of those raids? This brilliant work will certainly please the scholarly reader. DeLay's smooth narrative and transparent style make it also accessible to the educated non-specialist . The book is richly annotated with references to a wide array of English- and Spanish-language primary and secondary sources, including Mexican official documents , newspapers, and archival sources hitherto untapped by American scholars . DeLay's discussion benefits from the abundant quantitative data that he has compiled and presents in a magnificent appendix. The book includes informative maps, a good selection of images, and a carefully crafted index. All in all, DeLay's superb scholarship has culminated in a nuanced yet lucid narrative that will doubtless become a required reference for U.S., Mexico, Native American, and Borderlands scholars for a long time. Texas Stale University-San MarcosJoaquín Rivaya-Martínez Texas Confederate, Reconstruction Governor: fames Webb Throckmorton. By Kenneth Wayne Howell. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2008. Pp. 270. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 9781603440400, $29.95 cloth.) Kenneth Wayne Howell's biographical offering, Texas Confederate, Reconstruction Governor:James Webb Throckmorton, diligently traces the life and political career of famed Texan James Webb Throckmorton. More importantly, the book apdy utilizes the entirety ofThrockmorton's vast partisan career to highlight distinct arguments concerning class politics, race relations, and frontier development in the Lone Star State over the course of half a century. Although slighdy repetitive in some areas, Howell provides a critical but fair analysis ofThrockmorton's political machinations and exposes a wealth of primary letters, election results, campaign rhetoric, and newspaper materials to solidify his contentions. Texas Confederate, Reconstruction Governor tells the complex story of a man who voted against secession but donned the grey in defense of the Confederacy and states' rights; one who clashed notably with General Philip H. Sheridan and allied himself with the ill-fated Andrew Johnson. He was forcibly removed from the governor's mansion only to return as a decade-long member of Congress, and who stood as a powerful force in local, state, and national politics for nearly five decades. Howell relates Throckmorton's Odyssey clearly, and his effort to harness the ex-governor's accomplishments to paint a dynamic portrait of a divided state grappling with secession, war, Reconstruction, industrialization, and racial strife is laudable. According to Howell, a blend of Whig politics, firsthand encounters with the harshest realities of frontier life, a peculiar brand of white supremacy, and an unshakable devotion to the economic prosperity of North Texas fueled Throck- 414Southwestern Historical QuarterlyJanuary morton's rise to power and his eventual removal from the governor's office as an "impediment to Reconstruction." (105) Through his exploration of Throckmorton and nineteenth-century Texas, Howell uncovers a slew of intra-southern cultural divisions that strike directly at the idea of a monolithic southern regional identity. Particularly interesting, Howell thoroughly dissects Throckmorton's racial agenda, dealing with both African Americans and Native Americans. The book oudines Throckmorton's obsession with defending the white frontier from Indian attacks. He sought to manipulate the federal government into military assistance as he fought to preserve Whig conservatism and a non-autocratic military audiority in Texas. Clearly a white supremacist, Throckmorton also despised African-American slaves because they represented the affluence and mobility of an elite planter class that threatened to confiscate premium frontier land from his constituency, a district of small farmers. In short, Howell maintains that Throckmorton "developed an irrational hatred of them [slaves]," because "he did not have a problem with the institution ofslavery as a legitimate labor system," but "he harbored animosity toward the planters who used slave labor to amass wealth and dominance in die southern states" (43). By grouping together the physical attacks levied by displaced Indians and the economic...