Violence in the Hill Country
Violence in the Hill Country
The Texas Frontier in the Civil War Era
2022 Ramirez Family Award for Most Significant Scholarly Book, Texas Institute of Letters
An in-depth history of the Civil War in the Texas Hill Country, this book examines patterns of violence on the Texas frontier to illuminate white Americans’ cultural and political priorities in the nineteenth century.
In the nineteenth century, Texas’s advancing western frontier was the site of one of America’s longest conflicts between white settlers and native peoples. The Texas Hill Country functioned as a kind of borderland within the larger borderland of Texas itself, a vast and fluid area where, during the Civil War, the slaveholding South and the nominally free-labor West collided. As in many borderlands, Nicholas Roland argues, the Hill Country was marked by violence, as one set of peoples, states, and systems eventually displaced others.
In this painstakingly researched book, Roland analyzes patterns of violence in the Texas Hill Country to examine the cultural and political priorities of white settlers and their interaction with the century-defining process of national integration and state-building in the Civil War era. He traces the role of violence in the region from the eve of the Civil War, through secession and the Indian wars, and into Reconstruction. Revealing a bitter history of warfare, criminality, divided communities, political violence, vengeance killings, and economic struggle, Roland positions the Texas Hill Country as emblematic of the Southwest of its time.
[A] fascinating new study...Employing a sophisticated and creative research and analysis of Texas Hill Country patterns of interpersonal, ethnic, political, and economic violence during the key transitional period of the mid to late nineteenth-century, Nicholas Roland skillfully weaves into his narrative a host of local, state, and national contexts the overall assessment of which forms a welcome, even vital, contribution to the literature of westward expansion. A multitude of scholarly and popular reading audiences, including American Civil War, Indian Wars, Southwest borderlands, and German American immigrant history students, are abundantly well served through the contents of this book. Violence in the Hill Country is highly recommended.
Roland provides a good narrative of what happened in the Hill Country, and he should be commended as the first to place these well-known violent events, especially the aptly named Nueces River Massacre, within a broader historical context...Roland does an excellent job of using a variety of primary resources—including government records, newspapers, letters, and memoirs—to create a thorough narrative.
This well-written, meticulously researched book offers a scholarly assessment of many long-popularized stories and events…Recommended.
This is an important addition to the literature on Texas during the Civil War and to frontier and violence studies. Roland’s extensive endnotes, especially those on the Nueces River battle, will be particularly useful for scholars seeking to expand their understanding of this important topic.
Roland does a great job of contributing to the study of violence in Texas, joining scholars such as Barry Crouch, James Smallwood, and Kenneth Howell by bringing the study into the realm of the Civil War where most research focuses on the Reconstruction Era. The author weaves throughout the narrative unique stories of individual violence to highlight how personal many of the killings were. He also supports many points with quantitative analysis. His unique approach in this study allows him to contribute to many subfields in Texas history including frontier, German, and Civil War history.
[Roland] 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...Roland has created a well-written work that greatly enhances the historiography related to the period and region...General readers and historians alike will enjoy this book both for its readability and for the author’s diligent primary source research.
More than a case study of the Texas Hill Country, this book helps us better understand westward expansion and the ways in which the Civil War increased tension and violence among white settlers on the frontier of the slave South. The analysis is always sound, frequently very insightful, and based on outstanding research in both published and unpublished sources.
An insightful study of how the violence of insurgency and counterinsurgency shaped the Texas Hill Country's ethnic, social, economic, and political relations during the Civil War era. Accounting for nearly timeless global patterns, Roland's work will be of interest not only to historians but also to security scholars.
Nicholas Roland is a historian at the Naval History and Heritage Command in Washington, DC.
Chapter One. The Texas Hill Country on the Eve of the Civil War
Chapter Two. The Hill Country in Antebellum Politics and the Secession Crisis
Chapter Three. From Secession to the Nueces River
Chapter Four. Indians, Inflation, and Bushwhackers
Chapter Five. Civil War and Political Violence
Chapter Six. Reconciliation and the Incorporation of the Texas Frontier
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Appendix A. Indian Raiding Deaths during the Civil War
Appendix B. Casualties of Civil War Violence, 1862–1865
Appendix C. Indian Raiding Deaths after the Civil War
Notes
Index
Journey to Texas, 1833
By Detlef Dunt; Translated by Anders Saustrup; Edited by James C. Kearney and Geir Bentzen
William Hanson and the Texas-Mexico Border
Violence, Corruption, and the Making of the Gatekeeper State
By John Weber
