Reviewed by: Violence in the Hill Country: The Texas Frontier in the Civil War Era by Nicholas Keefauver Roland Christopher Menking (bio) Violence in the Hill Country: The Texas Frontier in the Civil War Era. By Nicholas Keefauver Roland. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2021. Pp. 288. Cloth, $45.00.) For many Americans, Texans included, the Texas Hill Country remains a unique and little-known region. In Violence in the Hill Country, Nicholas Keefauver Roland delves into the violence that engulfed the Hill Country in the Civil War era and investigates possible causes for the spike in deaths during this period. His analysis covers the years roughly spanning 1850 to 1880 and addresses twelve Texas counties that experienced an increase in wartime violence. Roland argues that the uptick in violence during these years was a result of the struggle for power between Confederates and Unionists. He uses David Kilcullen’s model, originally created to explain urban insurgencies, to provide a theoretical framework in which to place the competing interests in the region. While the model provides a useful tool to help understand the increased violence, other factors beyond a high-level struggle for power came into play in a region like the Hill Country. Before the Civil War, the Hill Country existed on the western frontier of settled land in Texas. The prewar experience of limited governmental oversight and low taxation created among the settlers a unique mix of staunch independence and self-reliance in defending their homesteads from Native American raids. Their reaction to the Confederate government’s new imposition of taxes and draft of Hill Country residents may have contributed to the hostilities. The author weaves a detailed and well-researched narrative of the years before, during, and after the Civil War, providing the reader with a vivid image of Hill Country life during this time. The use of primary sources, including government records, memoirs, letters, and newspapers, provides a depth to the narrative. Roland, however, makes limited use of important secondary sources written over the past few decades that would have provided additional historical context. He does an excellent job of placing events within a larger historical narrative, one of the book’s primary historical contributions, but by neglecting some of these secondary sources, he misses important explorations of the timing of the violence. For example, works related to the Great Hanging at Gainesville, a mass killing of Unionists in North Texas, would have enriched Roland’s discussion of the loss of life in the Hill Country. Also, sources relating to the guerrilla and partisan violence in Missouri and Kentucky should have been included, particularly because Roland mentions these similar cases without accompanying citations. The author’s highly readable prose brings such events as the Nueces Massacre to life. The massacre is little known or discussed outside of the Hill Country, even in Texas. Roland’s book provides the first major effort to [End Page 571] place the massacre within the context of the larger historical narrative of the Civil War era, and also to offer an explanation as to why it, and general violence, gripped the region. This important contribution to the historiography begins to fill in a long-standing gap in Texas and Civil War history. Readers interested in the American Civil War, Texas history, or the Texas Hill Country will all benefit from this book. Roland makes a diligent effort to create a framework for using the Hill Country in the Civil War era as a template to analyze similar regions that experienced waves of violence and partisan warfare. The author discusses several factors that contributed to the rise in wartime violence: poverty, which resulted from a lack of marketable resources and a wartime drought; the withdrawal of the U.S. Army and the income it provided; geographic isolation; and cultural aspects, such as a sense of racial superiority, hypermasculinity, and a tradition of vigilantism. Considering that vigilantism, race-based lynching, and more conventional violent reprisals persisted into the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Roland’s narrative begins to offer origins for the violence that continued in the region. Overall, Roland has created a well-written work that greatly enhances the historiography related to...