Texas Terror: The Slave Insurrection Panic of 1860 and the Secession of the Lower South by Donald E. Reynolds (review)

The editors have rendered a significant service to students of Texas history by making more readily available a valuable resource for the study of the antebellum and postwar Texas frontier. A brief introduction provides a biographical sketch of Bliss and offers insights into the editorial process. The original manuscript included more than twelve hundred pages that the editors skillfully trimmed for publication. Their final product boasts ample detail regarding daily life in West Texas without drifting too far from the primary narrative, while the introduction and careful notations impart additional insight into Bliss’s personality . For example, the soldier claimed several times throughout the manuscript that he did not use notes and worked strictly from memory. The editors make clear, however, that Bliss was a careful note-taker during his career and that many stories were simply too detailed to have been reproduced from memory alone. Bliss also insisted that he would never use “political influence” (p. 382) in order to secure a promotion, though he clearly did exactly that on more than one occasion. In the end, this volume is indispensable for serious students of nineteenthcentury Texas military history. Because Bliss’s narrative proves both a valuable resource and an interesting read, and due to the editors’ proficient and detailed preparation, this book accomplishes a difficult feat—it will appeal to Texas history specialists and popular audiences alike. East Central University Bradley R. Clampitt Texas Terror: The Slave Insurrection Panic of 1860 and the Secession of the Lower South. By Donald E. Reynolds. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007. Pp. 252. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 978-0-80713-283-8. $45.00, cloth.) This is one of those histories of an apparently small event whose influence far transcends its immediate importance. The “Texas Troubles,” as they were called at the time, were sparked by a series of mysterious fires in northern Texas in July 1860. Circumstantial evidence, a demoralizing heat wave and drought, and the slaveholders’ willingness to believe the worst about their slaves and about itinerant Yankees who supposedly encouraged the slaves to rise against their masters inspired southerners to believe that a conspiracy of bondspeople and abolitionists were plotting to poison whites and burn their towns and farms. News of the so-called insurrection broke just as the divisive presidential election of 1860 headed into its home stretch, and advocates of secession in Texas and throughout the future Confederacy used the sensational news from the Southwest to move beyond their traditional abstractions of what might happen to concrete examples of what would happen if Lincoln were to win the White House. Perhaps dozens of slaves and whites were killed, while scores, perhaps hundreds, more were beaten, whipped, or warned off. Even as doubt began to surface in the early fall, fire-eaters took advantage of the momentum provided by the excitement to push their formerly hesitant fellow southerners into secession. Reynolds succeeds at a number of levels. First of all, he provides the most 2009 Book Reviews 325 *jan 09 11/26/08 12:00 PM Page 325 thorough history of the “Troubles,” which despite having been mentioned in countless monographs, textbooks, and popular histories, have not previously been as deeply or sensitively researched. Triangulating contemporary newspaper accounts and personal letters and diaries with memoirs and early histories of the incidents, Reynolds provides a coherent narrative of the events and, even more importantly, of the ways in which Texans, southerners, and northerners interpreted them. He ably unpacks the motivations and arguments of editors and witnesses whose accusations fanned public belief in the conspiracy and plausibly suggests that the famous letter implicating the northern Methodist minister Anthony Bewley—chased by vigilantes into Missouri, brought back to Fort Worth, and lynched—was actually written by secessionists seeking to whip up public opinion against him. Second, he makes a rational argument for the centrality of these incidents to the radicalization of many southerners during the latter half of 1860. Although he hardly claims that the Civil War would not have occurred without the “Terror,” he shows how the supposed uprising rippled through the politics of Texas, the South, and the United States, providing fuel for fire-eaters like...