David Paul Smith

Both the Union and the Confederacy responded to the start of the Civil War by withdrawing some troops from the frontier, where they had been defending against Native Americans. The Union, of course, had a lot more frontier to withdraw from – the Great Plains and the Rockies – while the only Confederate state with a “frontier” was Texas. (The Confederacy claimed Arizona and New Mexico as territories, and did some fighting in each – but against Federals, not natives).

Even when they were part of the Union, Texans weren’t entirely happy with their frontier defense; as a result, they had set up their own state organization – the Texas Rangers. When Federal troops withdrew from Texas after secession, the state expected the Rangers to take up the slack; the Rangers moved into abandoned Federal posts – in a few cases there were some confrontation with departing Federal troops, but no outright violence. Bureaucrats in Austin and Richmond got into the act, with Texas insisting that troops raised in Texas should stay in Texas and Richmond wanting them sent east. As is often the case, the two governments tried to fix things by rearranging the organizations rather than actually adding troops; thus the entity responsible for frontier defense was successively the Texas Ranger Regiment (State); Texas State Troops (State); The First Texas Mounted Rifle Regiment (Confederate); The Frontier Regiment (State); Texas State Troops Mounted Regiment (State); The Frontier Regiment (Confederate); The Texas Cavalry Border Regiment (Confederate); and the Frontier Organization (State). The frustration grew to the point that the Texas government unilaterally abrogated Confederate draft laws to allow soldiers raised in the State to stay there for frontier defense. This caused a flurry of messages back and forth between Texas and Richmond; by 1864 the question was moot since Grant had captured Vicksburg and cut the transMississippi off from the rest of the Confederacy.

As time went on, the Texas frontier began to have more problems than just Native Americans. The northern part of Texas had always been proUnion and most of the counties along the northern border -mostly small farmers and ranchers with few slaveholders - had voted against the succession ordinance. The area became a refuge for draft dodgers, deserters, and out-and-out bandits; there was supposedly a large-scale conspiracy to turn the area over to the Union. The authorities put a stop to that in 1862; 41 supposed Union sympathizers were arrested. The city of Gainesville set up a special “Citizens Court”, which had no validity under State law and stocked a jury with slaveholders; at first there was a sham of due process with a few convicted men being hanged after sort of a trial, but mob pressure resulted in the surrender of the rest of the accused and they were lynched under the supervision of a Confederate colonel. This was the largest mass lynching in US history. Author David Paul Smith mentions the involvement of a shadowy organization, the Sons of the South – not a direct ancestor of the Ku Klux Klan but apparently similar in spirt.

As is often the case, this sort of terrorism backfired, and resistance to the state and Confederate government increased in the affected area, to the extent that frontier troops spent most of their time looking for other Texans rather than defending against Native American raiders. This, in turn, led to a few very successful Comanche and Kiowa raids deep into the territory. The natives were generally interested in running off horses and cattle (the war had increased the demand for beef, which hadn’t interested the natives very much previously; Federal quartermasters in Kansas were willing to buy cattle from natives without inquiring where they got them). However, the tribes were perfectly willing to rape, murder, and burn if the opportunity presented itself. At one point the Texas authorities enlisted the aid of the notorious William Clarke Quantrill and his band; as should have been expected Quantrill was more interested in plundering civilians than fighting Indians or deserters and he eventually was dismissed (and then actually left, probably to the considerable relief of the officials involved).

One of the saddest native-Texas confrontations occurred in 1865 at the Battle of Dove Creek. The natives involved were not the normal Comanche or Kiowa, but a band of 500 or so Kickapoo. The Kickapoo originally came from what is now Indiana, but had been displaced successively west until they ended up in Indian Territory. The Civil War disintegrated authority there, and the Kickapoo, trying to remain neutral, were harassed by everybody; Federal troops, Confederate troops, proUnion Indians, and proConfederate Indians. Thus a considerable fraction of the tribe decided to emigrate to Mexico, where a few had settled years earlier. They were progressing peacefully across the Texas plains when they were reported by scouts as a band of raiders (to be fair, up until this point any large group of Native Americans on the Texas plains really were raiders, so the Texans can’t really be faulted for making that assumption). The Texans responded by sending both Texas state troops and Confederate national troops to intercept the “raiders”; the attack was a fiasco. The Kickapoo scouts had advance warning of the attack and set up well-concealed defensive positions. The Texan and Confederate attacks were uncoordinated, giving the Kickapoo time to shoot one body of attackers to ruin, then shift on interior lines to engage the other. The Texans and Confederates were decisively defeated; the Kickapoo left in good order to continue to Mexico. One elderly Kickapoo was left behind; he explained who they were and why they were in Texas. In the spirit of the times he was summarily executed. (Again to be fair, by that time in the war the units involved had taken to summarily executing white deserters, draft-dodgers, and anybody else that they didn’t like).

Smith’s book is a moderately difficult read; there are many paragraphs describing unit reorganizations, changes in command, and the bureaucratic impedimenta involved in running a military. Maps of the various arrangements of frontier military districts during the war; no illustrations other than a generic Texas ranger on the front cover and a generic Confederate infantryman in the front matter. The index is quite sparse and I had trouble looking up things I wanted to review.… (mais)