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  • Hood's Texas Brigade: The Soldiers and Families of the Confederacy's Most Celebrated Unitby Susannah J. Ural
  • Steven E. Woodworth
Hood's Texas Brigade: The Soldiers and Families of the Confederacy's Most Celebrated Unit. By Susannah J. Ural. Conflicting Worlds: New Dimensions of the American Civil War. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017. Pp. xvi, 382. $48.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-6759-5.)

The oft-repeated claim that social history enriches, rather than replaces, traditional military history proves true in Susannah J. Ural's clear, highly readable narrative. Hood's Texas Brigade: The Soldiers and Families of the Confederacy's Most Celebrated Unitis an excellent military history of the brigade that also looks back at the thoughts, challenges, and struggles of the loved ones left behind in Texas. In so doing, it helps explain why the brigade became the Confederacy's most celebrated unit.

The members of the First, Fourth, and Fifth Texas Infantry regiments enlisted specifically to fight in Virginia. Most of them came from upper- and [End Page 1010]middle-class families and were fiercely committed to the Confederate cause. Ural sees in this commitment, both by soldiers and by their families, part of the reason for the brigade's unusual combat success, along with their desire to live up to the popular belief that Texans were experienced and formidable fighters.

Recruited as companies in towns across East Texas, formed into regiments, and shipped east separately, the First, Fourth, and Fifth Texas regiments came together as a brigade near Dumfries in northern Virginia in the late fall of 1861. Brigaded with them were the Eighteenth Georgia Infantry and the infantry battalion of Wade Hampton's South Carolina Legion. Later these two non-Texas units were replaced in the brigade by the Third Arkansas Infantry. The brigade's first commander was the bombastic Texas politician Louis T. Wigfall. Fortunately for the troops, Wigfall went into the Confederate senate before serious fighting started, and the brigade fought its first battles under the command of the former colonel of the Fourth Texas, now Brigadier General John B. Hood. It first won glory in the June 1862 battle of Gaines's Mill, where it broke the Union line in a bloody assault. Later that summer the brigade again broke Union lines at the second battle of Manassas, and its counterattack helped save General Robert E. Lee's left at Antietam. Each victory came at high cost, and new recruits from Texas only partially made up for the constant drain in numbers. Families back in Texas suffered severe emotional blows in the loss of multiple family members.

The Texas Brigade's next hard fight was at Gettysburg, where for the first time it was checked, being turned back from the crest of Little Round Top. Again its casualties were heavy, including Hood, who had moved up to division command. The brigade suffered severe losses in September 1863 at Chickamauga and in the fruitless campaign in East Tennessee. Morale was further undermined when beloved brigade commander Jerome B. Robertson was court-martialed for offending a favorite of the corps commander. Wintering in East Tennessee and enduring a lack of good leadership, the brigade suffered its lowest morale, but confidence in and commitment to the Confederacy never flagged in the great majority of its soldiers. In the campaigns of 1864, the Texas Brigade dramatically saved Lee's army at the Wilderness, at the cost of two-thirds of its remaining numbers, and then suffered another bloodletting in the battle of Darbytown Road. Only about six hundred men were left to surrender at Appomattox. After the war, brigade veterans formed an association to support each other and the families of their late comrades.

Ural shows how the Confederate commitment of both soldiers and their families at home sustained morale so as to make the brigade an unusually effective combat unit and to keep the great majority of its surviving, unmaimed members with the colors until the very end. Her book is a useful and welcome addition to the literature of the Civil War.

Steven E. Woodworth
Texas Christian University

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