Why Texans Fought in the Civil War (review)

With its distinct history and distant location, Texas occupied a unique place within the Confederacy. Perhaps no state, Union or Confederate, sent its soldiers as far and wide to fight. In addition to defending their vast land and its neighbors, Texans invaded New Mexico and Pennsylvania, and battled from Kentucky to Georgia. In a book written for Civil War scholars and amateurs, Charles David Grear tries to explain what motivated Texans to fight near and far in the Civil War. His answer boils down to location, location, location. According to Grear, "Where a Texan came from had a direct impact on why he fought in the Civil War and, more important, where he fought" (5). During the 1850s, the state population nearly tripled as thousands of young men migrated to Texas from across the South. When war erupted, these men anxiously enlisted to defend their kin and former homes from invaders. Men who preferred to protect Texas tended to have deeper ties to the Lone Star State. According to Grear, local military units and garrisons had larger percentages of native Texans and men who moved to the state in early childhood. Foreign immigrants volunteered in similar patterns. Germans and Mexicans who had lived in Texas longer were more likely to acclimate to southern culture and fight for the Confederacy. More recent migrants preferred to stay out of the conflict or sided with the Union.

Grear's thesis that local affiliations determined why and where Texans fought relies heavily on evidence he gleaned from one source, a compilation of the Texas Confederate Home Roster. This collection includes postwar testimonies that veterans and widows gave about their ties to Texas when they sought medical care at the home. Grear claims the roster provides more accurate information than the manuscript census, but he has not confirmed people's statements in another source. Patients seeking medical care at a state home might have exaggerated their ties to Texas, but Grear apparently accepts their stories completely. He does not divulge how many veterans he identified in the roster, nor does he explain how his sample is representative of all Texas troops. Nonetheless, he uses data from the roster to generalize and compare the residency rates of all Texas military units. This problem could undermine his thesis, because the roster only contains the records of Confederates who stayed in Texas after the war and sought medical attention from the home. Thus the roster would seem inherently biased toward people with deeper local attachments to Texas. At times Grear pushes his thesis with statistically insignificant data. For example, he argues that local bonds explain why Texans chose to fight in the eastern theater or Texas, because "over 7 percent" of Texans fighting in Virginia "moved to Texas by their fifth birthday, compared to 12 percent of the men who remained behind to defend the Lone Star State" (76). An appendix with tables might have revealed the meaning and significance of such statistics. Questions about method and sample size could also have been easily addressed with an appendix.

Grear's focus on local bonds is unusual, because it stresses how these attachments motivated soldiers to fight, whereas Civil War historians traditionally emphasize how localism encouraged desertion and eroded Confederate nationalism. Grear admits that localism cut both ways. When the war reached Texas in 1863, men who had enlisted in 1861 to fight elsewhere ached to return home. These soldiers' local attachments were also complicated by competition between two nationalisms—Texas versus Confederate. If Grear had thoroughly researched and reflected on this situation, he could have engaged debates about Confederate nationalism from a fresh perspective. Instead, he merely notes that Texas nationalism "proved stronger" (33). It is unclear how Texas nationalism differed from the Confederate version. Nor is it obvious why Texas identity would prevail considering that most Texas soldiers were recent migrants. Grear quotes soldiers devoted to Texas but then admits (correctly) that their statements sound identical to declarations...