Lone Star Unionism, Dissent, and Resistance: Other Sides of Civil War Texas. ed. by Jesús F. de la Teja (review)

This collection of original essays emerged from a symposium held at Texas State University in 2014 that brought together a number of scholars working on disparate aspects of the experience of non-Confederates in Texas during the Civil War era. That gathering was in part intended to counter the myth of a "monolithically pro-Confederate Texas" that has persisted in the popular mind and further marginalized other Texans, notably Unionists, dissenters, and resisters, who belie the notion of statewide political homogeneity (p. 3). While professional historians have done much to illuminate the complexity of conditions prevailing in wartime Texas—where interests and alliances often proved mutable and uncertain—the focus of scholarly attention nonetheless remains overwhelmingly on the Confederacy.

Lone Star Unionism, Dissent, and Resistance: Other Sides of Civil War Texas seeks to remediate that disparity. Toward that end, the volume draws on the voices and visions of a deeply informed cohort of scholars—including JesúsF. de la Teja, Laura Lyons McLemore, Andrew J. Torget, W. Caleb McDaniel, Victoria E. Bynum, Walter D. Kamphoefner, Omar S. Valerio-Jiménez, Richard B. McCaslin, Rebecca A. Czuchry, Elizabeth Hayes Turner, and Carl H. Moneyhon—to explore the circumstances of Texans of diverse backgrounds and identities who were less than eager to lend their support to the Confederate cause. The contributors examine substantial groups spanning racial, ethnic, gender, socioeconomic, cultural, and political dimensions, and incorporating long-term residents, new immigrants, and refugees. These groups range from enslaved and Mexican Texans, whose significance to the larger project is immediately apparent, to the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, whose role is less intuitive. Although the essays do not adhere to any standard organizational schema, they are presented in a manner that accentuates their distinct methodological and thematic approaches, enhancing the book's readability as well as its pedagogical utility.

As de la Teja explains in his introduction, Lone Star Unionism, Dissent, and Resistance "starts with the proposition that the collective memory of Confederate Texas has always been problematic" (p. 8). Although the concept of collective memory is defined in an endnote, its deeper implications for the collection are not considered. While it could be argued that social or collective memory is implicitly at issue throughout the volume, it is most directly engaged in the articles by McLemore and Turner. McLemore's article centers on the role of Texas women engaged in the construction of a collective memory of the war, something the author notes was an elusive endeavor, and Turner's entry offers an intriguing look at the development of Juneteenth celebrations in the state, which were not simply occasions for merrymaking, but were events with a "subversive underpinning" bespeaking freedpeople's determination to one day make real emancipation's promises of freedom and equality (p. 196).

Turner's discussion of the heightened threat of violence to emancipated African Americans in areas where Union troops were sparse intersects nicely with McCaslin's exceptionally well researched study of anti-Union violence in North Texas and Czuchry's valuable work on the vicious attacks perpetrated against freedwomen throughout the state. McDaniel's essay on "refugeed slaves"—those removed to Texas to protect the financial interests of slave owners—is particularly compelling, evocatively portraying the tenuousness of life in bondage (p. 60). Torget provides a complementary analysis of slave flight during the war. Critical ethnic dimensions of Unionism are afforded thoughtful treatment by Kamphoefner (of German Texans) and Valerio-Jiménez (of Tejanos). Finally, two authors use the biographies of individual actors as a means of elucidating different facets of opposition to Confederate rule in the state. Readers familiar with Bynum's exemplary work on the Free State of Jones will see it invoked in her scrutiny of East Texas Unionism through...