Violence in the Hill Country: The Texas Frontier in the Civil War Era

by Nicholas Keefauver Roland

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.

288 pages, Hardcover

First published February 9, 2021

Reviews

[Laura Jean]

I found this book to be fascinating.

I grew up in the Northeastern United States. As a child, I had this idea of the US Civil War as two diametrically opposed forces with little grey areas. Oh, I had heard it was "brother against brother", (you'd think a kid living in a former border state would have more readily believed it.) but I didn't really believe it. In my mind, the "southern" states were all "pro slavery" and "pro states rights" and the north were "abolitionists" and "Federalists". So it came as quite a shock to me when I read Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War by T. J. Stiles earlier this year.

The Jesse James book provided a wonderful background to this book. The Texas Hill Country, like Missouri, was a frontier area. So you had these pockets of "unionists" in a solidly Confederate state like Texas. The author did a great job of explaining why this was so and also why, how unlike in Missouri, the rancor between the Unionists and Former Confederates did not last much past 1865.

Now, this book has me very curious about the formation of West Virginia. This area was not the frontier, but it did share some similarities with the Hill Country. I want to see how they compare.

This book is fairly academic in nature, but it is very readable and again, I found it fascinating. If you are interested in Civil War History or Texas History, this book is an in-depth view into a very interesting yet little known facet of the Civil War.

[Ed]

This book was perfect for me because I need reference material for a book I'm writing. Roland does a very nice job presenting his thesis and covering all the various reasons for violence during the early years of the Hill Country settlements. What I love is his inclusion of so many names of real characters and their stories. This book is gold as a reference.