Contested Empire: Rethinking the Texas Revolution ed. by Sam W. Haynes and Gerald D. Saxon (review)

For students of Texas history, Contested Empire offers a look into some of the newest scholarship on the revolutionary period. Edited by Sam Haynes and Gerald Saxon, accomplished Texas historians in their own right, this book contains five unique assessments of the revolution. Greg Cantrell’s introduction deserves special mention as well for its excellent discussion on the ways in which historians have treated Texas history and the revolution in particular.

Eric Schlereth, in his “Voluntary Mexicans: Allegiance and the Origins of the Texas Revolution,” examines the apparent ease with which Mexicans and Anglo-Americans changed allegiances in leaving their country of origin, joining Mexico and shifting their support to the rebellion and the new republic. Using this concept of “voluntary allegiance,” Schlereth reveals that “patriotism was transferrable” and, therefore, the revolution and its outcome was a “deeply contingent” event. These ideas, of course, are quite resonant today.

In his “‘Imitating the Example of our Forefathers’: The Texas Revolution as Historical Reenactment,” Sam W. Haynes focuses on the revolutionary motives of Anglo-Texans and reveals the degree to which collective memory of the American revolutionary experience guided actions. Particularly helpful in understanding the intellectual connectivity of the Texas experience with that of American history, Haynes delivers an excellent (if all too brief by necessity) recitation of America’s “creation narrative.” Haynes succeeds in not only demonstrating how Texans connected to the American experience but also how rapidly they disassociated themselves almost immediately by fashioning a unique “Texas creation narrative,” which has tended to obscure, as Haynes put it, the degree to which Anglo-Texans “had once been, in a very real sense, re-enactors of the American Revolution.”

Miguel Soto reveals the importance of land speculation, particularly that of Mexican speculators, in bringing about the Texas Revolution in his “Politics and Profits: Mexican Officials and Land Speculation in Texas, 1824–1835.” The course and character of land grants after the Mexican Revolution from Spain had produced a minority of Spanish and Mexicans in Texas; according to Soto, this was “a decisive factor in the outcome,” suggesting that “Mexican sovereignty over Texas” may have “already been compromised long before” what happened at San Jacinto.

Will Fowler in his “The Texan Revolution of 1835–1836 and Early Mexican Nationalism,” like Soto, evaluates the revolution from a Mexican perspective. By examining period writings, Fowler argues that the Mexican national consciousness that grew in the post-1848 period owed its underpinnings to the earlier revolutionary period. This “early vision of Mexicanidad,” according to Fowler, emphasized a collective Hispanic heritage, Catholicism, abolitionism, spiritualism over materialism, and distrust of the United States (and land-grabbing Americans). As Fowler shows, although Mexican national identity took time to grow, it did not appear out of whole cloth during the Mexican-American War era; it was already present, at least among Mexican intellectuals in the Texas revolutionary period.

While acknowledging the importance of slavery in the debate over American annexation of Texas, Amy Greenburg in her “‘Time’s Noblest Empires Is the Last’: Texas Annexation in the Presumed Course of American Empire” takes a broader view and submits that some Americans were concerned “that annexation of Texas would lead to the internal collapse of the United States.” Using Thomas Cole’s series of 1836 allegorical paintings of the five stages of empire, Greenburg certainly succeeds in what she proposed for her essay, letting Cole’s The Course of Empire “weave the web of the story.” By doing so, Greenburg reminds us that the debate over annexation of Texas was part of a larger discourse on American empire.

This book represents the printed version of the forty-eighth annual Prescott Webb Memorial Lectures held at the University of Texas at Arlington in 2013. Each chapter examines Texas history from more modern perspectives, which reflect recent trends in history—transnational, cultural, and...