Country of the Cursed and the Driven: Slavery and the Texas Borderlands by Paul Barba

Abstract

Reviewed by: Country of the Cursed and the Driven: Slavery and the Texas Borderlands by Paul Barba Paul Conrad Country of the Cursed and the Driven: Slavery and the Texas Borderlands. By Paul Barba. Borderlands and Transcultural Spaces. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021. Pp. xviii, 452. $65.00, ISBN 978-1-4962-0835-4.) How exceptional is the history of Texas? Historians have examined Texas as a place where Native Americans dominated long after colonialism began, where the West met the South, where the Black/white racial binary was complicated, and more. There is also a long popular tradition of understanding Texas as unique, with an emphasis on the region as a distinctly heroic, freedom-loving place. Paul Barba's new book engages these conversations with deep research, analytical precision, and an impassioned argument. For Barba, the story of Texas history during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is the story of slavery and the violence that undergirded it. As he concludes, "Texas was a cursed land, with virtually all of its people implicated, as victims or as perpetrators in over a century and a half of slaving violence" (p. 317). The long chronology and multiracial focus of Barba's analysis are noteworthy and key to his historiographical interventions. The chapters in Parts 1 and 2 reframe early colonial Texas history as the story of how Spanish and [End Page 767] Comanche conflicts over power and labor remade the social landscape of the region. Barba's emphasis on the inherent violence of captive taking and captive incorporation is a key contribution here. While some scholars have seen the potential to transition from slave to kin status as a key distinction between slavery in the borderlands and chattel slavery in the South and elsewhere, Barba pushes back on this argument by casting kinship as means of control. "Family making was a coercive process," he writes, "a means to solidifying slaver authority in a violent, unstable place" (p. 176). Part 3 extends the analysis forward through much of the nineteenth century. Here Anglo-Americans and their practices of chattel slavery join those of Comanche and Hispanic peoples. By making clear the dizzying diversity of victims and perpetrators of slavery, Barba's analysis makes for essential reading alongside other recent accounts of slavery in Texas during this period, such as Andrew J. Torget's Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800–1850 (Chapel Hill, 2015) and Alice L. Baumgartner's South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War (New York, 2020). Barba concludes with an epilogue that traces the legacies of slavery in the region after the U.S. Civil War and emancipation. He concludes that it was U.S. state power that finally brought an end to slavery in Texas, noting that "the violence of war and conquest proved to be the only remedy to the malady of borderlands slavery" (p. 317). Barba has crafted a deeply researched account of the importance of slavery in Texas across the longue durée. He convincingly demonstrates how slaving violence influenced all the peoples who encountered each other in the region. Yet I found myself coming back to the question of Texas exceptionalism. Barba notes at the outset that Texas was "rather unique," highlighting the longevity of slave trades, the diversity of slavers and enslaved, and the connections between slaving violence and nations' efforts to dominate others to support this point (p. 2). Yet similar histories of slaving violence unfolded in the borderlands of New England, the Southeast, the Great Basin, California, the Caribbean, and elsewhere, as recent studies have made clear. If Texas was "cursed," it seems so, too, was most every corner of the Americas. It is a grim conclusion that I imagine Barba would not disagree with. His is not primarily an account of survival, redemption, or even resistance. Country of the Cursed and the Driven: Slavery and the Texas Borderlands is an unflinching account of the ubiquitous and enduring human capacity for inhumanity. Paul Conrad University of Texas at Arlington Copyright © 2022 The Southern Historical Association