Brush Men and Vigilantes: Civil War Dissent in Texas. (Book Reveiws).

Brush Men and Vigilantes: Civil War Dissent in Texas. By David Pickering and Judy Falls. Foreword by Richard B. McCaslin. Sam Raybum Series on Rural Life. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, c. 2000. Pp. xxvi, 223. $24.95, ISBN 0-89096-923-X.)

In 1863 diarist Kate Stone branded the Sulphur Forks area of northeastern Texas "the dark corner of the Confederacy" (p. 24). In this volume, two cousins with deep roots in the area, journalist David Pickering and teacher Judy Falls, cast a clear beam of light into the darkness. By delving into the causes and results of little-known instances of vigilante lynchings of unionists, the authors illuminate a number of important issues: the failure of the Confederacy to protect civil liberties, the nature of white-on-white lynchings, and the ways that conflicting loyalties to family, state, and nation affected the lives of ordinary rural people.

As the Civil War approached, the four counties that comprised Sulphur Forks were already riven by class tensions between prosperous slave-holding families from the deep South and small farmers of upper South origin. Unionist sentiment was strong and outspoken among the upper South communities. Upon the outbreak of war, some unionists fled north. Former state senator Martin D. Hart became captain of a company of Forks men enrolled in Federal cavalry in Missouri. Other unionists, such as lawyer and future Populist leader E. L. Dohoney, accepted the secession vote as binding and loyally supported the Confederacy. Still others, pressured or conscripted, reluctantly entered Confederate service. Some of these deserted, however, and hid out in the dense brash thickets of the Forks area. These "brash men" were joined by others fleeing conscription and also by a detachment of Captain Hart's men sent home to recruit more Texans for the Union.

Secessionists reacted violently to anything that hinted at abolitionism. Vigilantes and Texas Home Guards hunted down and meted out lynch justice to some of the more persistent of the "brush men." In 1862 vigilantes hanged five members of the Hemby and Howard families after a kangaroo trial. The next year three mobs lynched two more civilians and seven of Captain Hart's men. After the war E. L. Dohoney, now a district attorney, tried to bring the lynchers to justice, but new officials elected under presidential Reconstruction stymied his efforts.

Pickering and Falls, relatives of the Hembys, began their research as a genealogical inquiry, but it quickly grew into something much more. As lead researcher, Falls skillfully used the Intemet to tap the oral traditions of the scattered families of the murdered men. This well-written, copiously footnoted work is a fine example of how, with breadth and depth of research and a good grasp of the historiographical issues, local history can personalize the great events of politics and war. Its innovative research and demythologizing effect make it a fine choice as the inaugural volume of the new Sam Raybum Series on Rural Life.