Walker's Texas Division, C.S.A.: Greyhounds of the Trans-Mississippi.

Walker's Texas Division, C.S.A.: Greyhounds of the Trans-Mississippi. By Richard Lowe. Conflicting Worlds: New Dimensions of the American Civil War. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004. Pp. xvi, 339. $39.95, ISBN 0-8071-2933-X.)

Richard Lowe's study examines the soldiers and combat record of John G. Walker's Texas Infantry Division, the largest unit of Texas troops to fight in the Civil War. The Greyhound Division, as it was known, was never as famous as Hood's or Granbury's Texas Brigades. While Hood's men served with Lee in Virginia and Granbury's troops formed a part of the Army of Tennessee, Walker's Division campaigned and fought in the trans-Mississippi theater. Raised late in 1862, it consisted of volunteers who went to war more reluctantly than the first wave of recruits who enlisted after the incident at Fort Sumter. These volunteers found it harder to leave civilian life for military service because they were poorer, a bit older, and many had wives and children. The typical volunteer "was a native of the lower South, in his mid to late twenties, married and the head of his own household, and a non-slaveholding farmer" (p. 25). They joined up to defend homes and families from northern invasion. Their service in the trans-Mississippi theater served as a constant reminder that keeping Yankees out of Texas was the main reason for going to war.

Lowe addresses the perennial issue of whether the Confederate war effort was "a rich man's war and a poor man's fight." Based on quantitative analysis of 2,200 soldiers, his answer is no. The Texas soldiers of Walker's Division "reflected the society around them. They were not poor cannon fodder thrown at the enemy by the wealthy" (p. 24). At the end of the book, in an appendix that enumerates battlefield casualties, he again examines the "old gripe" about the war having been mainly a poor man's fight (p. 263). He concludes that wealthy men bled and died just as poor men did and did so "at a rate one might expect from a group with their share of the overall population" (p. 264). Throughout the study Lowe finds little evidence of severe strife between plain folk and elite-minded Confederates over raising volunteer troops, conscription, and the conduct of the war itself. In August 1864 hundreds of soldiers deserted to protest rumors that the division was about to cross the Mississippi River to help defend Mobile and Atlanta. This proposed move troubled many because it meant abandoning their primary mission to protect loved ones from Yankee invasion. This was why they had fought from the beginning. Lowe does not see the "Greyhound uprising" as crucial evidence of the plain-folk soldiers' ideology or consciousness (p. 238). He concludes that the uprising was the "story of the citizen soldier in the Civil War in microcosm," who, while he may have grumbled and fussed about the hardship and indignity of a soldier's life, usually obeyed orders and did what he was told (p. 239).

As military history this book succeeds admirably, but as a social history of plain-folk Confederate soldiers it leaves an important issue unresolved. Lowe's study concludes, as we have seen, that the Texas soldiers of Walker's Division did not experience the war, in any sense, as an internal class struggle between slaveholding planters and nonslaveholding yeomen. Broader studies of the southern yeomanry before and during the war have told a different story, however--a story that emphasizes the autonomy of plain folk in their beliefs and sentiments and the growing disloyalty and alienation their ideas stirred under the severe strain of war. Missing from either perspective is an explanation that accounts for both alienation and allegiance among Confederate plain folk. Until historians are able to offer a deeper understanding of the mixed record of disaffection and heroic sacrifice that Lowe's narrative describes, the story of the yeoman nonslaveholders' Civil War will remain incomplete.

Texas A&M University

CHARLES E. BROOKS