The Robertsons, the Sutherlands, and the Making of Texas (review)

228Southwestern Historical QuarterlyOctober North and Soudi that followed the elimination (or the beginning of elimination) of slavery north of the Mason/Dixon Line and Ohio River during the era of the American Revolution. The North won this war, pulling ahead ofthe South, as Wright points out, in population, infrastructure, and technology. Wright indicates the ways in which slavery contributed to these failings in southern economic development, but, probably as a result ofthe time/space constraints ofthe lecture format, he pays little attention to other explanations. For example, he deals briefly with the role ofgeography as it affected certain aspects of the South's economy, but he does not consider how geography probably retarded the growth of industry. Steeply falling rivers in die New England states offered abundant waterpower for factories. Texas, where tfie rivers flow sluggishly to the Gulf, had no comparable source of energy for industry. Nitpicking aside, Wright's book forcefully reminds us of how slavery affected economic development in the United States. Slaves, as property, were forced to work in ways that wage laborers would not work. This gave the South an early advantage in developing its agricultural economy, but it contributed to a lack of economic development in other ways and to a less dynamic society then and in the future. University ofNorth TexasRandolph B. Campbell The Robertsons, the Sutherlands, and the Making of Texas. By Anne H. Sutherland. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2006. Pp. 222. Preface, acknowledgments , illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 1585445207. $29.95, cloth.) Combining memoirs, family history, and an impressionistic essay, anthropologist Anne H. Sutherland describes her forebears' experiences in Texas and examines the Texan group identity they developed during the Republic era and sustained through six generations. In so doing, she stresses two themes: die significance of families and religion in the setdement and development of Texas and the paramount importance of the Texas Revolution in forming a Texas identity. She develops those themes by looking at, and writing from the perspectives of the families of two of her great-great-great-grandfathers: George Sutherland, a leader of the Alabama settlement in Austin's colony, and Sterling Clack Robertson, empresario of Robertson's colony. By avoiding moral judgments and placing her family's experiences in the broader context ofAmerica's westward movement, she fashions a generally unbiased, interesting combination ofwell-known Texas events and more obscure occurrences. Almost all of the author's focus on a Texas identity comes in the first twelve of her book's twenty-two chapters. In the first four chapters, she explains her own acquisition ofa Texas persona, discusses a variety ofhistorical writings, and introduces two sets of primary sources on which she strongly relies. Those sources consist of her private collection of the Sutherland family's letters, manuscripts, and other writings; and the published, nineteen-volume Papers Concerning Robertson's Colony in Texas. The next seven chapters chronologically cover the roles ofthe Robertsons and Sutherlands in the American colonization of Mexican Texas and emphasize 2oo7 Book Reviews229 their participation in the Runaway Scrape and the batdes of the Alamo and San Jacinto. Chapter Twelve then consists of a speculative essay in which Sutherland argues that participants in the Texas Revolution acquired a unique identity that included a sense of Texas as a place, as well as a loyalty to the idea of a sovereign Texas. That identity arose, she asserts, because the revolutionaries and their families derived from the revolution a "meaning [that] is analogous to the emotional and structural experience of a rite of passage" (p. 106). In subsequent chapters, the author covers her family's activities from the revolution through the early 1 900s. As she does for the earlier period, she stresses the strength her family found in their religion and kinship ties. Her chronological coverage ends with the marriage of her paternal grandparents, a great-granddaughter of Sterling Robertson and a great-grandson of George Sutherland. She then concludes with a chapter that describes how storytelling and Sutherland family reunions assisted in intergenerational transfers of a distinctive, collective self-perception. Sutherland's extensive primary sources, as well as secondary sources that include early histories ofTexas and local histories oftwo Texas...