The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 105, July 2001 - April, 2002 Page: 710

71 Southwestern Historical Quarterly April
"brush men," an unspecified number of Unionists were also murdered in the area
during and immediately following the war. Despite the protests of Unionists in
the years after the war, such as provisional governor Andrew Jackson Hamilton,
many of the crimes were forgotten or covered up. In the century that followed,
the old, myopic, and grizzled Confederate heroes and their apologists, dominat-
ed the historical spotlight as the state's love affair with the Confederacy empha-
sized selective remembering and writing and obscured the historical record.
Number one in the Sam Rayburn series on rural life by Texas A&M University
Press, this impressive study stands in stark contrast to the traditional Civil War
books that have chronicled the heroism of Texans on the hallowed and bloodied
fields of such places as Shiloh and Gettysburg. Brush Men and Vigilantes represents
a fresh and revealing look at Civil War Texas, a horrid story of humiliating death
and the struggle for survival. While reading of the vendetta that took the lives of
five members of the Hemby and Howard families in February 1862, one wonders
in how many other Texas towns and villages, especially the German frontier com-
munities in the Hill Country, could a dedicated and determined historian uncov-
er similar incidents of intolerance and brutality. With an excellent foreword by
Richard McCaslin, this highly readable book, filled with significant and meaning-
ful insights, makes a significant contribution to Texas Civil War History.
Texas A&M International University Jerry Thompson
Rethnking Southern Violence: Homicides in Post-Civil War Louisiana, i866-1884. By
Gilles Vandal. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000. Pp. x+319. Ac-
knowledgments, introduction, aftermath, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN o-
8142-5041-6. $19.95, paper.)
Between 1866 and 1884, the Pelican State experienced at least 4,986 homi-
cides (of which 771 occurred in New Orleans and 4,215 in rural areas); an annu-
al average of 262, or 32 per 100,00o inhabitants. Louisiana emerged, according
to Gilles Vandal, in this wide-ranging study of Reconstruction and post-Recon-
struction violence, "as the most violent Southern state, with the sole exception of
Texas" (p. 4). What caused this tremendous and extensive murderous upheaval
across the South during Reconstruction and Redemption? Professor Vandal of
the Universite de Sherbrooke in Canada, attempts a thorough and rigorous anal-
ysis of the sources for one state to answer the central question of lawlessness in the
postwar era.
It seems to this reviewer, and he has written about violence in one state, that it
is time to reevaluate the ideas of those Reconstruction historians, such as Michael
Perman in an essay in the John Hope Franklin festschrft (The Facts of Reconstruction
[1991]), who suggest that intimidation was not the major factor in defeating the
Republican effort in the South. Gilles Vandal's Rethinking Southern Violence obvi-
ates this perception about the mistreatment of the black population in the two
decades following the Civil War. The author's careful evaluation, statistical analy-
sis, and explications from these numerical results, tells us much about the origins
and perpetuation of the outrages.