Hood’s Texas Brigade: The Soldiers and Families of the Confederacy’s Most Celebrated Unit by Susannah J. Ural (review)

Susannah J. Ural has written an uneven but extremely revealing book on a storied military unit. Her work is uneven because it does not adequately explain why the soldiers of the Texas Brigade initially went off to fight in the Civil War or how they compared to soldiers in other units. Her work is revealing because she convincingly explains why the soldiers of the brigade kept fighting despite an astounding casualty rate and difficult circumstances.

The most glaring example of its falling short in explaining initial motivation comes in the author’s discussion of secession and the Marshall Guards, a component of Hood’s Texas Brigade. Ural states that Harrison County, where Marshall was the county seat, “voted against secession that spring” (26). The author cites an entry on Harrison County in the Handbook of Texas as her source, but the entry actually accurately states that Harrison, where slaves outnumbered the free population, voted overwhelmingly for secession. The author would have been better served if she had dug deeper into circumstances in all the counties that supplied the original volunteers. For example, the Marshall Guards are extensively discussed in Randolph B. Campbell, A Southern Community in Crisis: Harrison County, Texas, 1850–1880, but that work is not cited. While the author is correct that volunteers such as these did not own a large number of slaves, the middle-class shopkeepers, tradesmen, and professionals who made up the Marshall Guards depended on an economy powered by slavery and most likely aspired to be slaveholders. Enthusiasm for slavery may well have been closely linked with enthusiasm for going off to fight in Virginia.

That aside, Ural makes the important point that early enthusiasm for volunteering helped explain the soldiers’ remarkable willingness to continue fighting. Once in the fight, they doggedly remained. The author could have strengthened this point by a brief comparison of units drawn from nearby Lamar and Angelina counties, where the vote actually did go against secession and slavery was less established and less important.

Her argument, however, suggests why some Confederate soldiers continued till the end. Simply put, Ural posits that early enthusiasm for volunteering combined with loyalty to their commanders, support from their families and communities, and pride in their unit and dedication to their comrades created an intense desire to continue fighting. Once their commanders had surrendered, however, they went home.

Ural offers a large amount of primary source evidence in support of her argument that identification with commanders and leaders underpinned unit cohesion and performance. This was especially true of John Bell Hood, one of the brigade’s early commanders, and of Robert E. Lee, the commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, but it was also true of other, less prominent leaders. Whatever Lee asked them to do, they seemed willing to try, but away from him they performed less effectively and were less stable. Loyalty to leadership, not just the talent and skill of those leaders mattered.

If letters from back home are a guide, the soldiers’ families reinforced determination to keep fighting. Family members did not write in despair and beg soldiers to return. Perhaps because they were, in general, relatively affluent, these families struggled to get by but never became desperate. The distant home front did not draw Texas Brigade soldiers back with the same force as in units that were closer to home or whose families were in more desperate circumstances.

Family members also reinforced the pride that members of the Texas Brigade took in their unit. Convinced they were a superior fighting force that could overcome all odds, if Lee or Hood asked them to attack they moved with great determination. Few wanted to lessen the sheen that the public increasingly awarded the brigade or to let down their comrades.

Once Lee surrendered at Appomattox...