The Civil War on the Rio Grande, 1846–1876 ed. by Roseann Bacha-Garza, Christopher L. Miller, Russell K. Skowronek (review)

The Civil War affected all parts of the United States, but much that occurred far from the major battlefields has slipped from public memory. Faculty at universities, curators of local museums, and community members in southern Texas have been working to reverse that inattention, developing a Civil War trail that stretches through five counties on the lower Rio Grande (Cameron, Hidalgo, Starr, Zapata, and Webb Counties) and Kenedy County immediately to the north. The results include a website with a virtual trail, signs for the actual sites, a Facebook page, classroom materials, and a previous book that tells the story of the project (Christopher L. Miller, Russell K. Skowronek, and Roseann Bacha-Garza, Blue and Gray on the Border: The Rio Grande Valley Civil War Trail [College Station, Tex., 2018]), which describes the trail and discusses African American soldiers. Russell K. Skowronek writes the concluding essay in the book under review. His summary adds little except his useful explanation that the work reflects a “‘cubist’ approach” to “the American Civil War era along the Rio Grande” (p. 292). Cubist he defines, from David Hurst Thomas, as “a combination of oral and documentary history, ethnographic analogy,” and archaeology (p. 271). Together, these approaches should provide a better understanding of the conflict and its impact. In truth, this goal has been only partially achieved.

Oral history concerning the Civil War has obvious limitations, but all history is only as good as the written corroboration of different sources. The authors of these essays use some great sources, especially Mary Margaret McAllen, who relies on the archives of the McAllen Ranch. But those familiar with Texas in the Civil War era will find a substantial number of important secondary works missing from the bibliography and endnotes, which contain sources not listed in the bibliography. Standard histories of Texas and the trans-Mississippi theater are absent, as well as studies on such topics as blockade-runners and Reconstruction politics. Biographies of important characters who are mentioned repeatedly—Edmund J. Davis, John S. Ford, José María de Jesús Carbajal, Philip Sheridan, Porfirio Diaz, and Benito Juárez, for example—are not cited. This oversight leads to mistakes, such as misidentifying the regiment of Union cavalry that Davis led, declaring that Davis was governor of Texas in 1875, giving the wrong rank for Ford in 1864, and misstating Texas cotton production.

Concerning ethnography, several authors, most notably McAllen and Jerry Thompson, provide good insights on the relations between Tejanos and Anglos. But it is on the topic of African Americans that the work becomes too narrowly focused. Roseann Bacha-Garza has an intriguing essay on three mixed-race families, and W. Stephen McBride and James N. Leiker have interesting essays on African American soldiers during the first years of Reconstruction. Apparently, few of the soldiers stayed in the Rio Grande Valley after their enlistment, yet there were other African Americans who were just as vital in shaping the area. While the figures are misquoted several times in this volume, there were fourteen slaves in Cameron, Hidalgo, and Starr Counties in 1860, and the first two counties also had the largest populations of free black people in Texas at that time. Their stories, as well as those of the slaves, would enrich the ethnographic history of the Rio Grande Valley Civil War Trail. This analysis would be much more useful than repeating uncorroborated stories about the Underground Railroad in Texas and how Ford and Santos Benavides worked as slave hunters.

Rolando Garza has worked long and hard on military archaeology in the Rio Grande Valley, but the Palmito Ranch battlefield has yielded little. Only forty of the more than three thousand acres of the site have been...