William Pitt Ballinger: Texas Lawyer, Southern Statesman, 1825-1888. (Book Reviews).

William Pitt Ballinger: Texas Lawyer, Southern Statesman, 1825-1888. By John Anthony Moretta. Foreword by Don E. Carleton. Barker Texas History Center Series, No. 7. (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, c. 2000. Pp. xii, 331. $29.95, ISBN 0-87611-166-5.)

It is not obvious that William Pitt Ballinger's career justifies a scholarly biography, but John Anthony Moretta has provided one that, like its subject, is conventional, competent, meticulous--and sometimes a little dull.

A highly respected lawyer in Texas before and after the Civil War, Ballinger was never a major political--or judicial--figure. A Whig who owned a few household slaves, he bravely opposed secession. But when Texas cast its lot with the Confederacy, Ballinger did the same, serving in the unglamorous role of receiver of alien enemy property.

Ballinger opposed, first, the extreme reactionary policies in Texas and the rest of the South immediately after the Civil War that did so much to prompt Congressional Reconstruction, and later the less attractive parts of the 1876 Texas Constitution. He urged Texans to accept the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments and even supported black suffrage, although (not surprisingly) he never accepted that blacks were the social or intellectual equals of whites. His name was floated for the U.S. Supreme Court seat that Rutherford B. Hayes promised to give to a southerner after the Compromise of 1877.

The author demonstrates many of the virtues of a good biographer, especially in his sympathetic but critical approach to his generally admirable subject. Two related shortcomings, however, pervade the book. The first is the author's confident but often unconvincing claims to discern the inner recesses of his subject's mind. The second is his tendency to exaggerate the evidence that Ballinger was both an extraordinary Renaissance man and an extraordinary lawyer.

In his acknowledgments the author describes the encouragement he received "to write a bold biography by putting Ballinger on the couch and exploring what animated him from childhood to adolescence to adulthood" (p. ix). He even confesses to consulting a psychologist in this undertaking. One result is Moretta's recurring pronouncements that Ballinger was driven by a Whig-like devotion to order and justice carefully controlled by a powerful elite. "Ballinger was called to the law by a craving for power--power in order to create a stable, ordered, and prosperous life not only for himself but for his world as well" (p. 6). Elsewhere Ballinger is described as "the epitome of the Tocquevillian elitist" and "an interesting combination of privilege tempered by a pragmatic acceptance of the democratic realities of his time" (p. 253).

Ballinger certainly earned his reputation as one of Texas's leading barristers, but the author's claims of special greatness for his subject remain unproved. Similarly unconvincing on the evidence offered is his description of Ballinger as a polymath, "one of the most compleat [sic] men of his time--lawyer, soldier, public servant, and civic leader; author, editorialist, philosopher, botanist, naturalist, education reformer, and bibliophile" (p. 4).

The book's opening scene, Jay Gould coming to Texas in 1881 to seek Ballinger's opinion on a railroad acquisition, presages Moretta's portrait of a behind-the-scenes nestor of the law helping to shape the Gilded Age. But with the exception of a legal challenge to one of Gould's railroad consolidations, Ballinger's railroad work appears to have been mostly the standard tort defense that occupied most railroad lawyers of the period. Indeed the author's description of Ballinger's law practice sounds very much like those described as commonplace in William G. Thomas's recent monograph, Lawyering for the Railroad: Business, Law, and Power in the New South (Baton Rouge, 1999).

ROBERT DEAN POPE
Richmond, Virginia