Between the Enemy and Texas: Parsons's Texas Cavalry in the Civil War (review)

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS355 numbers had been correct. As pointed out by the undersigned in this journal ("Pinkerton and McClellan: Who Deceived Whom?" vol. 34, no. 2 [June 1988: 115-42]), Pinkerton, in daring history to prove him wrong, shows that he really believed those estimates; that they were not simply fashioned to McClellan's order, an inference for which some reasonable evidence exists. The suspicion that Pinkerton's book is the work of a ghostwriter who had too free a hand is inescapable. As Pinkerton died the year after the book was published, it is reasonable to speculate that illness prevented him from doing research or properly supervising the writer he may have employed. The reprinted book bears a cover showing a gray-clad officer in a campaign hat. The only relief from shades of gloomy grayness is the man's luminescent green eyes. Frivolous, yes—and a fitting cover for what reposes within. Edwin C. Fishel Arlington, Virginia Between the Enemy and Texas: Parsons's Texas Cavalry in the Civil War. By Anne J. Bailey. (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1989. Pp. xvi, 355. $25.95.) The westernmost part of the Civil War Confederacy—that lying west of the Mississippi River, including the states of Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas, disputed Missouri, plus the Indian Territory—was throughout the war a peripheral theater. Except for General N. P. Banks's foiled Red River campaign late in the war, the Union high command committed very little to it on the justifiable assumption that the critical theaters lay east of the Mississippi. And despite official rhetoric to the contrary, the Confederacy responded in a similar fashion, especially after the shocking losses suffered in early 1862 in western Tennessee. Having said that, it is nevertheless true that numerous battles were fought there, many of them as sanguinary as those farther east, although the size of forces engaged was miniscule compared to those in Virginia and Tennessee. For this and perhaps other reasons, historians of the Civil War have not devoted to this theater the attention it properly deserves. The author of the book under review says as much and attempts, in this study of the war west of the Mississippi, to atone for such neglect. Her subject is Colonel William H. Parsons of Texas. Parsons led a cavalry regiment that, along with others raised in Texas, fought in battles principally in Arkansas, Missouri, and Louisiana between 1862 and 1864, the most important and successful of which was the turning back of Banks's flawed attempt in the spring of 1864 to take control of east Texas. But for Confederate troops in these states, their war amounted 356CIVIL WAR HISTORY to little more than a holding operation, especially following the Union victory at Pea Ridge in northwest Arkansas in March 1862. At the time the Federals appeared to have solidified their control of Missouri and materially threatened Confederate positions in Arkansas and Louisiana— the natural buffer zone between, in the author's words, "the enemy and Texas." The major strengths of this work lie in the expert and incisive descriptions of battles fought, in the finely-drawn sketches of Parsons and his fellow Texans, and in the graphic portrayals of the lives of ordinary soldiers as they prepared for battle with the enemy and with the elements. In a manner of speaking, her study is what might be termed "microhistory ." But, unless such history contributes to an understanding of the larger war at a given point in its course, can it amount to much more than a compilation of discrete facts that have little relevance to anything beyond its boundaries? Furthermore, the texture of the work is uneven. There are broad brush strokes in which critical campaigns—such as Grant's against Vicksburg— bulk large, but the reader is then abruptly returned to Colonel Parsons and his 12th Texas with little indication as to how the two are related. Finally, some highly questionable generalizations as to the fighting qualities of the southern soldier appear in the Epilogue (205). Still, the research is impressive; the writing is lucid and often moving; and the illustrations, maps, and appendix augment the quality of this study of the Civil...