One of the most effective units to fight on either side of the Civil
War, the Texas Brigade of the Army of Northern Virginia served under
Robert E. Lee from the Seven Days Battles in 1862 to the surrender at
Appomattox in 1865. In Hood's Texas Brigade, Susannah J. Ural presents
a nontraditional unit history that traces the experiences of these
soldiers and their families to gauge the war's effect on them and to
understand their role in the white South's struggle for independence.
According to Ural, several factors contributed to the Texas Brigade's
extraordinary success: the unit's strong self-identity as Confederates;
the mutual respect among the junior officers and their men; a constant
desire to maintain their reputation not just as Texans but as the top
soldiers in Robert E. Lee's army; and the fact that their families
matched the men's determination to fight and win. Using the letters,
diaries, memoirs, newspaper accounts, official reports, and military
records of nearly 600 brigade members, Ural argues that the average
Texas Brigade volunteer possessed an unusually strong devotion to
southern independence: whereas most Texans and Arkansans fought in the
West or Trans- Mississippi West, members of the Texas Brigade
volunteered for a unit that moved them over a thousand miles from home,
believing that they would exert the greatest influence on the war's
outcome by fighting near the Confederate capital in Richmond. These
volunteers also took pride in their place in, or connections to, the
slave-holding class that they hoped would secure their financial
futures. While Confederate ranks declined from desertion and fractured
morale in the last years of the war, this belief in a better
life--albeit one built through slave labor-- kept the Texas Brigade more
intact than other units.
Hood's Texas Brigade challenges key historical arguments about soldier
motivation, volunteerism and desertion, home-front morale, and veterans'
postwar adjustment. It provides an intimate picture of one of the war's
most effective brigades and sheds new light on the rationales that kept
Confederate soldiers fighting throughout the most deadly conflict in
U.S. history.
