Texas Divided: Loyalty & Dissent in the Lone Star State, 1856-1874 (review)

BOOK REVIEWS93 Texas Divided: Loyalty & Dissent in the Lone Star State, 1856-1874. By James Marten. (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1990. Pp. 246. $25.00.) From the pre-secession era of the late 1850s to the end of Reconstruction in the mid-1870s, most of the states that comprised the Confederacy experienced divided political opinions and loyalties. During the secession period, arguments raged over the issue of the Union; during the war, peace movements—at least in some states—threatened the war effort; and during Reconstruction, conflicts between conservatives and scalawags often caused enmity between Southerners. Marten's book examines political and ethnic conflict in one of these Confederate states, Texas. The author believes that the Lone Star State's experience in dissent was unique enough to merit separate scrutiny, and perhaps he is right. Texas in 1860 remained much more a part of the frontier than its sister Confederate states. Indians still posed as great a threat to many settlers as did Lincoln or the abolitionists. Moreover, large and semi-isolated colonies of Mexican-Americans and German immigrants added distinctive ingredients to the quarrels of Texans over their state's commitment to the Union. Marten focuses largely upon disputes revolving around these ethnic communities, blacks, and pre-war political allegiances (i.e., Whig and Jacksonian elements opposing the newer Southern-rights Democrats). In doing so, he examines each of these elements during the period of secession, the war, and the later Reconstruction period, providing what is essentially a synthesis of previous scholarship. We read that the German community was divided on the Union, but that Anglo-Texans regarded the strong minority that stood by the Union as disloyal to the South; that Mexican-Texans, with little political influence themselves, were largely indifferent to these divisive issues, thus confirming the Anglos' opinion that they were a worthless lot; that blacks had ambivalent feelings toward their white masters (who treated them with suspicion), and generally welcomed freedom when it came; and that old Whigs and Jackson Democrats both favored the Union before the war, but tended to change colors—with the latter remaining more steadfast than the former—after Texas hoisted the Stars and Bars. In short, the author breaks no new ground in this effort. Although Marten's bibliography is impressive in its comprehensive inclusion of the most relevant primary and secondary sources, he has bitten off more than he can comfortably digest in attempting to cover so large and eventful a chunk of history in so slim a volume (180 pages of text). The result is that some important events and people get little attention. For example, the author hardly mentions A. B. Norton, editor of the Austin Southern Intelligencer and Sam Houston's "point man" in battling the secessionists (led by John Marshall of the Austin State Gazette). Methodology is also a problem. Chapter 3, entitled "The 94CIVIL WAR HISTORY Confederate Unionists and the War," consists of a dozen biographical sketches of Unionists who eventually supported the Confederacy. Yet from this small sampling, the author makes sweeping generalizations, comparing the different tendencies of Whigs and Jackson Democrats regarding their loyalty to the Union. Donald F. Reynolds East Texas State University The Shadow ofa Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Low Country 1670-1920. By Peter A. Coclanis. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Pp. 370. $39.95.) Has any state attracted a larger number of first-rate historians in the last quarter century than South Carolina? Since the mid-1960s, a splendid new work of history on the Palmetto State has been published about every two years. Among the most significant are: Joel Williamson's After Slavery, Steven Channing's Crisis of Fear, Thomas Holt's Black Over White, Peter Wood's BlackMajority, Daniel Littlefield's Rice and Slavery, Orville Vernon Burton's In My Father's House Are Many Mansions, Charles Joyner's Down By the Riverside, James Roark and Michael Johnson's Black Masters, Drew Faust and Carol Bleser's books on James Henry Hammond, Theodore Rosengarten's Tombée, and Lacy Ford's The Origins of Southern Radicalism. Now add Peter Coclanis and The Shadow of a Dream to the...