The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 100, July 1996 - April, 1997 Page: 112

Southwestern Historical Quarterly

with Gen. John B. Magruder's struggle to hold Galveston, the Union blockade
and dramatic blockade running, and salty Lt. Dick Dowling's victory at Sabine
Pass serving as the focal points. Other major sections on the Trans-Mississippi
Department concentrate on the service of Texas troops in Louisiana, particularly
Gen. John G. Walker's large infantry division and Gen. Tom Green's troopers,
which together effectively turned the tide against enemy attempts to launch mas-
sive invasions against Texas from the Bayou State. Thus did Texas Confederates
avoid the shock of personal devastation so common to the rest of the South.
The exploits of the war's most famous Texas units-those fighting east of the
Mississippi-including Hood's Brigade, Terry's Rangers, and Ross's Cavalry
Brigade, add an extra dimension to the sacrifices of manpower, supplies, and
fragile security evident on the home front. There the white women and their
families suffered and toiled, slave families proved increasingly resistant to au-
thority as the war dragged on, and soldiers battled Indians along the frontier
and chased down draft evaders, deserters, and die-hard Unionists throughout
the state, while political leaders grappled, with surprising success, to sustain the
war effort.
The final chapter is perhaps the best. Wooster provides vignettes of postwar
lives of a score or more Texans, the famous and the obscure, Confederate and
Unionist alike, depicting the deep impact of the Civil War on individual's lives
and fortunes and on the entire state. For those Texans who now consider their
state a part of the greater Southwest, it might come as a weird surprise that
slightly more than a century ago Texas was so fervently a member of the South-
ern nation as Wooster describes it in this important, well-crafted book. Perhaps
the essence of Texas's role and all that emerged from it can be understood more
fully by the fact that when former wartime Governor Francis R. Lubbock died in
1905 his coffin was draped with two flags: United States and Confederate.
Lyndon B. Johnson Library T. MICHAEL PARRISH
The Union, the Confederacy, and the Atlantic Rim. By Robert E. May. (West
Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1995. Pp. 169. Preface, introduction, in-
dex. ISBN 0-55753-061-0. $12.95, paper.)
Rebel Brothers: The Civil War Letters of the Truehearts. By Edward B. Williams. (Col-
lege Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1995. PP. 276. Preface, epilogue,
notes, index. ISBN 0-89096-656-7.)
In January 1862, Charles Trueheart, a Confederate soldier serving in Virginia,
wrote to relatives in Texas that "we have much to be thankful for to a merciful
and just God-a united South, continued victories, plentiful crops, warm and
good clothes to wear, and last but not least, the sympathies of the civilized world"
(Rebel Brothers, p. 44). But Trueheart's united South soon would be divided by in-
vading Union forces, Confederate victories would not continue, the warm and
good clothes of Southern soldiers would become threadbare, and the sympathies
of the civilized world proved to be an illusory disappointment. Trueheart's as-
sumption that the "civilized world" (which meant Europe to Southerners) would

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