Lone Star Unionism, Dissent, and Resistance: Other Sides of Civil War Texas
2017; Oxford University Press; Volume: 104; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/jahist/jax221
ISSN1945-2314
Autores Tópico(s)Race, History, and American Society
ResumoJesús F. de la Teja offers this collection of ten essays as a contribution to Texas history—aimed, he says, at subverting popular images of a “monolithically pro-Confederate” state (p. 3). But those with eyes less firmly fixed on the Lone Star State might also learn from its illustration of just how multifarious southern dissent could be. The east Texas draft resisters and deserters that Victoria E. Bynum writes about in her essay here shared much, including kin connections, with the piney woods Mississippians that peopled her The Free State of Jones (2001). But Texas offered a distinctive set of circumstances to its various anti-Confederate populations, often making their experiences different from those of counterparts to their east. Federal troops never went farther than the fringes of the enormous state. Thus, Loyalists—such as the north Texans that Richard B. McCaslin discusses in his essay on antiunionist violence—never enjoyed what succor federal occupation might eventually bring, such as in northwest Arkansas, where hundreds of Unionists holed up in Civil War equivalents of Vietnam's strategic hamlets. Without federal troops nearby, black Texans could not join slaves elsewhere in making war on their enslavement by fleeing en masse to the army or by enlisting in it. Texas, instead, became a refuge for slaveholding. But even there, both Andrew Torget and W. Caleb McDaniel show, masters quickly had to dispense with the comforting illusion that their slaves did not want to be free.
Referência(s)