The News from Brownsville: Helen Chapman's Letters from the Texas Military Frontier, 1848-1852

Abstract

The News from Brownsville: Helen Chapman's Letters from the Texas Military Frontier, 1848-1852. Edited by Caleb Coker. (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 2002. Pp. xxvi, 410. Illustrations, appendix. $29.95.) Helen Chapman was an army officer's wife, which by definition meant a woman of at least middle-class status and attitudes. Although their husbands could ride, hunt, supervise working-class enlisted soldiers, and otherwise gain the pleasures and benefits accorded men of their status on the frontier, women like Helen Chapman had little beyond their spouses to draw them west. Chapman left behind her family (including her son, boarded at an eastern school), her circles of friends, and the comforts of middle-class refinement and domesticity when she journeyed to Brownsville, Texas, to join her husband in 1848. Yet life in the South Texas borderlands quickly came to suit her, awakening an energy and selfreliance she had only just glimpsed in her years at army posts in Florida and the East. Four years later, left in her own home (as had often been the case while her husband traveled on army business) at Point Isabel when her husband went to a new post at Corpus Christi, Chapman observed that he was very much attached to this country. For herself, Chapman reflected: My attachment is altogether of a different kind. There could scarcely be found a spot less suited my natural tastes. Flat, insipid, hot, and worse than all to me, a slave state! I have a great relish for the refinements and elegancies of life and yet I am really not only resigned but contented to spend my days here. I know I can be useful far more apparently [here] than in an older community and there is really an exquisite gratification in feeling that you are working with those whose labor it is to make the wilderness bud and blossom as the rose (290). Chapman brought the values of the New England middle class to a growing region bursting with things new and strange to her; her letters range across a wide spectrum of mid-nineteenth-century attitudes, from the paternalism of Manifest Destiny to that of temperance and abolition. She felt a sense of duty and responsibility, both secular and religious, to educate, improve, and bring order to the uncertain frontier. Yet her letters also tell a subtle story of empathy and discovery, an encounter in which Chapman probably learned more than she was able to teach, and they speak to a number of conceptual issues in the study of American frontiers, the southwestern borderlands, and Victorian culture. They provide a calmly presented picture of the uncertainties of borderland life: violence and the threat of death were ever-present, whether in the form of disease or of robbery, both quite common in the poverty, heat, and humidity of a South Texas with few institutions structuring social interaction. Chapman's faith in the power of moral suasion and the possibility of reform was certainly tempered by this disorder, but she sprang to rather than shrank from the task she saw at hand. …