by Susannah J. Ural
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.
About the Author
Susannah J. Ural
is professor of history and codirector of the Dale Center for the Study of War
and Society at the University of Southern Mississippi. She is the author of Don’t
Hurry Me Down to Hades: The Civil War in the Words of Those Who Lived It
and The Harp and the Eagle: Irish-American Volunteers and the Union Army,
1861–1865.
ISBN 978-0807167595, LSU Press, © 2017, Hardcover, 400
pages, Maps, Photographs, End Notes, Selected Bibliography & Index. $48.00. To
purchase this book click HERE.
