Planting the Union Flag in Texas: The Campaigns of Major General Nathaniel P. Banks in the West by Stephen A. Dupree (review)

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 Louis T. Wigfall, altering the mindsets of Unionists like John Reagan, and providing gist for the secessionists in Lower South states, especially, who mentioned the events in the declarations they published to explain their votes to secede. As he suggests, “The slave panic could not have come at a worse time for those who loved the Union, or at a better time for those who wished to destroy it” (p. 168). Third, he shows with absolute clarity the shallowness of southerners’ vaunted confidence in their slaves’ loyalty and contentment and the extent to which southerners’ peace of mind required sometimes brutal applications of vigilante justice. Public safety committees, whose elections at town meetings provided a democratic mandate for their actions, were ruthless in following up the wildest rumors and punishing anyone to whom the slightest suspicion was attached. By September, even Texans admitted that many of the committees had gone too far in their persecution of subjects. By then, however, it was too late. Texas Terror is a well-written book with a strong point of view. Although on the surface it suggests that the worst armed conflict in the United States might have been caused by a blundering generation of gossips and propagandists, the book actually shows that the capacity for southerners to believe the wild stories out of Texas reflected the deep moral, emotional, and political divisions between the North and the South that led ultimately to civil war. Marquette University James Marten Planting the Union Flag in Texas: The Campaigns of Major General Nathaniel P. Banks in the West. By Stephen A. Dupree. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2008. Pp. 293. Preface, maps, illustrations, appendix, notes, bibliography , index. ISBN 1-58544-641-6. $40.00, cloth.) Many historians view Texas’s role in the American Civil War as an afterthought or a nice piece of trivia. Though many fine books have told the story of 326 Southwestern Historical Quarterly January *jan 09 11/26/08 12:00 PM Page 326 the Lone Star State during the war, none until Planting the Union Flag in Texas have explained why the state was so important to the Union. Stephen A. Dupree, a nuclear engineer, has creatively placed Texas back into the bigger picture of Civil War history by focusing on Nathaniel P. Banks’s five attempts to invade the state before 1865: the Battle of Galveston, the Battle of Sabine Pass, the Texas Overland Expedition, the Texas coast, and the Red River Campaign. He provides a new perspective on the invasions by pulling together all the major interpretations of why Abraham Lincoln wanted Texas: such as acquiring cotton for northeastern textile mills to provide a boost to the Northern economy; creating a presence on the border to deter the French occupation of Mexico, disrupting the Confederate international trade along the Rio Grande, and encouraging the significant number of loyalists, Germans in particular, to revolt against the Confederacy. By incorporating these views along with the reactions of all the major military leaders involved, including Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman, Dupree clearly...