The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 89, July 1985 - April, 1986 Page: 362

Southwestern Historical Quarterly

herence to his own critical canon, however, he omits consideration of
some suggestive problems. While he is interested, for example, in land
as an object of speculation, he does not discuss the land itself as a for-
mative force in the lives of the state's settlers. Also, in avoiding the taint
of nationalistic scholarship, Reichstein likewise omits an illuminating
discussion of the ways in which ethnic, regional, and national character
did affect the events of the Revolution.
The strengths of Reichstein's well organized and superbly researched
study, however, overshadow such omissions. While Der texanische Un-
abhiingigkeitskrieg, I835-36 does not seem to be the entire answer to
Reichstein's own criticism, it is the most comprehensive study on Texas
thus far by a German historian. As such, the work is both a valuable
account of the Revolution for the German reading public and a sub-
stantial contribution, in its own right, to the body of research on the
Revolution.
Reichstein has provided the work with numerous detailed and infor-
mative chapter endnotes, an extensive bibliography, and an appendix
of important historical materials.
University of Houston THEODORE GISH
The Confederate Governors. Edited by W. Buck Yearns. (Athens: University
of Georgia Press, 1985- Pp. 295. Introduction, notes, index. $27.50.)
In an 1867 article in The Land We Love, Colonel I. W. Avery, a Confed-
erate cavalry officer from Georgia, singled out the hostility between the
state and general governments as leading to that "miserable pack of
dissensions that finally broke the cause-" that "sapped our vigor, and
weakened our strength, that disunited our cooperation and resulted in
hopeless disaster." Historians and others have since developed this
theme of internal dissension as a major cause of the Confederacy's de-
feat. In his book State Rights in the Confederacy (1925), Frank L. Owsley
argued that the South's extreme states' rights convictions prevented the
states and their governments from giving the Jefferson Davis admin-
istration their full cooperation in the prosecution of the war. As Owsley
put it, the Confederacy's epitaph should read, "Died of State Rights."
The purpose of this volume is to analyze the role of the state gover-
nors in the Confederacy's war effort. Each of the thirteen authors is a
recognized authority on the Civil War in his state. (Ralph A. Wooster of
Lamar University prepared the essay on Texas.) All told, twenty-eight
men served as governors of the thirteen Confederate states. Most of
them were relatively young men in their forties. All were southern born
except two, all who served as their state's first Confederate governor

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