Review: Hood's Texas Brigade

          Just finished reading Susannah J. Ural’s Hood’s Texas Brigade: The Soldiers and Families of the Confederacy’s Most Celebrated Unit, an in-depth look at an impressive fighting group. This was an excellent read.

          Ural’s book takes the reader through a journey that visits the families and society that spawned and then supported Hood’s Brigade before, during and after the American Civil War. Using a variety of sources that generated a 29-page bibliography (21 pages of primary sources alone) at the back of the text, this book puts the reader face to face with the soldiers themselves.

          Ural tells the reader about the brigade’s loyalty to the Confederate cause and how that loyalty was really only tested when it was separated from the Army of Northern Virginia during the fall of 1863, fighting elsewhere for a few months. Despite the tremendous losses suffered on the battlefield (as well as the ones suffered to disease) and the difficulties experienced by loved ones back in Texas and Arkansas during the war, the Texas Brigade remained among the most successful Confederate Army fighting groups through the length of the war.

          Hood’s Texas Brigade is a different book from others of its type. Who were these men? Why did they remain loyal to a losing cause? Did their families at home support the war for as long a time as the soldiers did? Where was their greatest victory and what were their feelings after losing the war?

Professor Susannah J. Ural

          Ural argues that the Brigade continued to believe in the Confederacy’s chances for independence even after suffering through the loss at Gettysburg and the bloody victory at Chickamauga. How could that be true? Ural shows the evidence and tells the reader what it means.

          The answers make this book compelling because so much of what caused the Civil War in the first place and then made it last so long is evident in the story of the Texas Brigade. These men wanted to preserve the institution of slavery and when they didn’t, Ural’s work shows us what the Reconstruction period looked like in Texas. If the Brigade was an uncommonly capable military unit, it was still made up of normal, standard issue men of the time and this book illuminates their experiences.

          Your Loyal Blogger has now read three of Ural’s books (previously: Don’t Hurry Me Down to Hades: The Civil War in the Words of Those Who Lived It and The Harp and the Eagle: Irish-American Volunteers and the Union Army 1861-1865). Ural is a professor of history at the University of Southern Mississippi and is the codirector of the Dale Center for the Study of War and Society. She is a tenacious researcher and an outstanding speaker. She is a regular presenter at the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College, where she is scheduled to speak again this summer.

          Hood’s Texas Brigade: The Soldiers and Families of the Confederacy’s Most Celebrated Unit is an excellent read about the Civil War and is highly recommended here.

          Thanks for reading.