A look at the agency’s attempts to deliver justice to the Texas black community following the Civil War. Drawing on a wealth of previously unused documentation in the National Archives, this book offers new insights into the workings of the Freedmen’s Bureau and the difficulties faced by Texas Bureau officials, who served in a remote and somewhat isolated area with little support from headquarters. “[The] episodes in Texas Reconstruction history that Mr. Crouch relates, perhaps do more than broad generalizations to explain why the Freedmen’s Bureau failed, and how we lost the peace after the Civil War.” —New York Times Book Review “Crouch skillfully presents the Freedmen’s Bureau as one of the most unique, misunderstood, and maligned ad hoc reform agencies ever devised by a democratic government in the name of social and political freedom and equality.” —East Texas Historical Journal “Breaks new ground in Reconstruction history. [Crouch’s] study is among the first on the bureau in Texas and the first to focus on the subdistrict agent, the subassistant commissioner.” —Journal of Southern History
Barry Crouch was a pioneer revisionist whose work greatly influenced a new generation of Texas historians.... This anthology will appeal to many audiences, both academic and general. It will be an ideal reader for courses on Southern history, Texas history, and the history of African Americans.... This volume will also be controversial among laypeople and some scholars, especially among white Texans and other white Southerners. Many of them believe the Civil War is still raging and that old Dixie still has a chance to win. Their sacred cows, such as their view of 'scalawags' and 'carpetbaggers,' are confronted head on. Crouch might become the man they love to hate." —James Smallwood, Oklahoma State University (emeritus), author of Murder and Mayhem: The War of Reconstruction in Texas (coauthored with Barry Crouch and Larry Peacock), Time of Hope, Time of Despair: Black Texans during Reconstruction, and The Struggle Upward: Blacks in Texas This anthology brings together the late Barry A. Crouch's most important articles on the African American experience in Texas during Reconstruction. Grouped topically, the essays explore what freedom meant to the newly emancipated, how white Texans reacted to the freed slaves, and how Freedmen's Bureau agents and African American politicians worked to improve the lot of ordinary African American Texans. The volume also contains Crouch's seminal review of Reconstruction historiography, "Unmanacling Texas Reconstruction: A Twenty-Year Perspective." The introductory pieces by Arnoldo De Leon and Larry Madaras recapitulate Barry Crouch's scholarly career and pay tribute to his stature in the field of Reconstruction history.
In the tumultuous years following the Civil War, violence and lawlessness plagued the state of Texas, often overwhelming the ability of local law enforcement to maintain order. In response, Reconstruction-era governor Edmund J. Davis created a statewide police force that could be mobilized whenever and wherever local authorities were unable or unwilling to control lawlessness. During its three years (1870–1873) of existence, however, the Texas State Police was reviled as an arm of the Radical Republican party and widely condemned for being oppressive, arrogant, staffed with criminals and African Americans, and expensive to maintain, as well as for enforcing the new and unpopular laws that protected the rights of freed slaves. Drawing extensively on the wealth of previously untouched records in the Texas State Archives, as well as other contemporary sources, Barry A. Crouch and Donaly E. Brice here offer the first major objective assessment of the Texas State Police and its role in maintaining law and order in Reconstruction Texas. Examining the activities of the force throughout its tenure and across the state, the authors find that the Texas State Police actually did much to solve the problem of violence in a largely lawless state. While acknowledging that much of the criticism the agency received was merited, the authors make a convincing case that the state police performed many of the same duties that the Texas Rangers later assumed and fulfilled the same need for a mobile, statewide law enforcement agency.
Using original sources, this unique book focuses on the Deaf community during the 19th century. Largely through schools for the deaf, deaf people began to develop a common language and a sense of community. A Place of Their Own brings the perspective of history to bear on the reality of deafness and provides fresh and important insight into the lives of deaf Americans.
In the states of the former Confederacy, Reconstruction amounted to a second Civil War, one that white southerners were determined to win. An important chapter in that undeclared conflict played out in northeast Texas, in the Corners region where Grayson, Fannin, Hunt, and Collin Counties converged. Part of that violence came to be called the Lee-Peacock Feud, a struggle in which Unionists led by Lewis Peacock and former Confederates led by Bob Lee sought to even old scores, as well as to set the terms of the new South, especially regarding the status of freed slaves. Until recently, the Lee-Peacock violence has been placed squarely within the Lost Cause mythology. This account sets the record straight. For Bob Lee, a Confederate veteran, the new phase of the war began when he refused to release his slaves. When Federal officials came to his farm in July to enforce emancipation, he fought back and finally fled as a fugitive. In the relatively short time left to his life, he claimed personally to have killed at least forty people--civilian and military, Unionists and freedmen. Peacock, a dedicated leader of the Unionist efforts, became his primary target and chief foe. Both men eventually died at the hands of each other's supporters. From previously untapped sources in the National Archives and other records, the authors have tracked down the details of the Corners violence and the larger issues it reflected, adding to the reinterpretation of Reconstruction history and rescuing from myth events that shaped the following century of Southern politics.
This anthology brings together the late Barry A. Crouch's most important articles on the African American experience in Texas during Reconstruction. Grouped topically, the essays explore what freedom meant to the newly emancipated, how white Texans reacted to the freed slaves, and how Freedmen's Bureau agents and African American politicians worked to improve the lot of ordinary African American Texans. The volume also contains Crouch's seminal review of Reconstruction historiography, "Unmanacling Texas Reconstruction: A Twenty-Year Perspective." The introductory pieces by Arnoldo De Leon and Larry Madaras recapitulate Barry Crouch's scholarly career and pay tribute to his stature in the field of Reconstruction history.
In the tumultuous years following the Civil War, violence and lawlessness plagued the state of Texas, often overwhelming the ability of local law enforcement to maintain order. In response, Reconstruction-era governor Edmund J. Davis created a statewide police force that could be mobilized whenever and wherever local authorities were unable or unwilling to control lawlessness. During its three years (1870–1873) of existence, however, the Texas State Police was reviled as an arm of the Radical Republican party and widely condemned for being oppressive, arrogant, staffed with criminals and African Americans, and expensive to maintain, as well as for enforcing the new and unpopular laws that protected the rights of freed slaves. Drawing extensively on the wealth of previously untouched records in the Texas State Archives, as well as other contemporary sources, Barry A. Crouch and Donaly E. Brice here offer the first major objective assessment of the Texas State Police and its role in maintaining law and order in Reconstruction Texas. Examining the activities of the force throughout its tenure and across the state, the authors find that the Texas State Police actually did much to solve the problem of violence in a largely lawless state. While acknowledging that much of the criticism the agency received was merited, the authors make a convincing case that the state police performed many of the same duties that the Texas Rangers later assumed and fulfilled the same need for a mobile, statewide law enforcement agency.
Fascinating stories of enormous human interest from case studies illustrate both the need for and the effectiveness of the Freedmen's Bureau in Texas. Established by Congress in 1865 to help newly emancipated blacks make the transition from slavery to freedom, the Freedmen's Bureau is considered the first social welfare agency in American history. How effectively the Bureau carried out its mission, however, has long been a subject of debate. In this revisionist study of the Bureau's operations in Texas, Barry A. Crouch challenges traditional views that the Bureau was ineffective and asserts that its agents actually made considerable--and often successful--attempts to assist black Texans. Drawing on a wealth of previously unused documentation in the National Archives, Crouch offers new insights into the workings of the Bureau and the difficulties faced by Texas Bureau officials, who served in a remote and somewhat isolated area with little support from headquarters. Particularly interesting is the case of William G. Kirkman, a conscientious agent who was assassinated for his efforts to help black workers in Boston, Texas. While the Freedmen's Bureau ultimately achieved no lasting success in Texas or elsewhere, Crouch finds that it did not hinder the cause of freed people, as some critics have claimed. Operating during Reconstruction when whites were hostile toward Union efforts to enforce laws protecting blacks, the Bureau helped many individual former slaves and provided a forum where black Texans could assert their legal rights as citizens and free laborers. Of interest to all students of African-American history and of the Reconstruction period in Texas, The Freedmens Bureau and Black Texans is one of only three state studies of the Bureau published in recent years and the first book-length examination of the Bureau in Texas.
Although historians have detailed the exploits of desperadoes and outlaws in the latter part of the nineteenth century, those who emerged in the immediate post-Civil War era have been largely overlooked. These outlaws, who were most active in the tri-state area of Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas, harassed the Union army and Freedmen's Bureau agents and terrorized the black population. None spread more fear than Cullen Montgomery Baker (1835?-1869). In this engrossing biography, Barry A. Crouch and Donaly E. Brice sift through local folklore, legend, and fact to provide an accurate account of this southern desperado, whose exploits, if more widely publicized, "would (make) Jesse James and all the gunmen of pioneer days pale into insignificance", according to one promoter of the Baker legend. Nicknamed "Swamp Fox of the Sulphur", Baker has intrigued writers for more than one hundred years and was immortalized in The First Fast Draw, an early Louis L'Amour western. A disillusioned former Confederate soldier, Baker gained fleeting national notoriety promoting a defeated dream in the occupied South. Sharing many white southerners' resentment toward the North, he took to murdering individuals who cooperated with the South's reconstruction. His actions encouraged the rise of outlaw bands and indirectly assisted in the formation of the Ku Klux Klan. Encouraged and led by men like Baker, the violent gangs brutalized Union agents and freedmen. Local cooperation in concealing and aiding the outlaws made it difficult for police forces, politicians, and news agencies to gather reliable information on the "New Rebellion", as it was called by the New York Tribune in 1869. Numerous problems, fromthe powerlessness of the civil authorities to the insufficient numbers of the military, continued to weaken the Reconstruction government. Baker and his ilk, in effect, incited a second civil war. Cullen Montgomery Baker, Reconstruction Desperado is essential to understanding how deeply class and race divided the South during the Reconstruction era.
Barry Rose has had a full and eventful life: this book, consisting as it does of snippets of conversation he has had with all and sundry, is without 'form', its arrangement is not in datal or any other particular order, and is a book to be dipped into when there is an idle moment.
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