James M. Smallwood's Books

The Devil's Triangle

Ben Bickerstaff, Northeast Texans, and the War of Reconstruction in Texas

By: James M. Smallwood,Kenneth W. Howell,Carol C. Taylor

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The Devil's Triangle

Ben Bickerstaff, Northeast Texans, and the War of Reconstruction in Texas

By: James M. Smallwood,Kenneth W. Howell,Carol C. Taylor

In the Texas Reconstruction Era (1865-1877), many returning Confederate veterans organized outlaw gangs and Ku Klux Klan groups to continue the war and to take the battle to Yankee occupiers, native white Unionists, and their allies, the free people. This study of Benjamin Bickerstaff and other Northeast Texans provides a microhistory of the larger whole. Bickerstaff founded Ku Klux Klan groups in at least two Northeast Texas counties and led a gang of raiders who, at times, numbered up to 500 men. He joined the ranks of guerrilla fighters like Cullen Baker and Bob Lee and, with their gangs often riding together, brought chaos and death to the “Devil’s Triangle,” the Northeast Texas region where they created one disaster after another. “This book provides a well-researched, exhaustive, and fascinating examination of the life of Benjamin Bickerstaff, a desperado who preyed on blacks, Unionists, and others in northeastern Texas during the Reconstruction era until armed citizens killed him in the town of Alvarado in 1869. The work adds to our knowledge of Reconstruction violence and graphically supports the idea that the Civil War in Texas did not really end in 1865 but continued long afterward.”—Carl Moneyhon, author of Texas after the Civil War: The Struggle of Reconstruction

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241

Publisher

University of North Texas Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1574417827

ISBN 13

9781574417821

Murder and Mayhem

The War of Reconstruction in Texas

By: James Smallwood,Barry A. Crouch,Larry Peacock

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Murder and Mayhem

The War of Reconstruction in Texas

By: James Smallwood,Barry A. Crouch,Larry Peacock

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.

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212

Publisher

Texas A&M University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1585442801

ISBN 13

9781585442805

Texas Divided

Loyalty and Dissent in the Lone Star State, 1856-1874

By: James Marten

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Texas Divided

Loyalty and Dissent in the Lone Star State, 1856-1874

By: James Marten

The Civil War hardly scratched the Confederate state of Texas. Thousands of Texans died on battlefields hundreds of miles to the east, of course, but the war did not destroy Texas's farms or plantations or her few miles of railroads. Although unchallenged from without, Confederate Texans faced challenges from within—from fellow Texans who opposed their cause. Dissension sprang from a multitude of seeds. It emerged from prewar political and ethnic differences; it surfaced after wartime hardships and potential danger wore down the resistance of less-than-enthusiastic rebels; it flourished, as some reaped huge profits from the bizarre war economy of Texas. Texas Divided is neither the history of the Civil War in Texas, nor of secession or Reconstruction. Rather, it is the history of men dealing with the sometimes fragmented southern society in which they lived—some fighting to change it, others to preserve it—and an examination of the lines that divided Texas and Texans during the sectional conflict of the nineteenth century.

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257

Publisher

University Press of Kentucky

Published Date

ISBN 10

0813148030

ISBN 13

9780813148038

History of the Twelfth West Virginia Volunteer Infantry

And The Story of Andersonville and Florence

By: William Hewitt,James N. Miller

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History of the Twelfth West Virginia Volunteer Infantry

And The Story of Andersonville and Florence

By: William Hewitt,James N. Miller

Includes: The regimental history of the 12th West Virginia Infantry, originally published in 1892 The Story of Andersonville and Florence by James N. Miller A complete regimental roster and index An Excerpt: The attack on Fort Gregg, Petersburg, Virginia, April 2, 1865: ...when within 50 yards of the fort, Sergt. Emanuel M. Adams of Company D, color-bearer, fell wounded. The colors were picked up and bravely carried forward by Private Joseph R. Logsden of Company C, as the brigade charged on over the dead and wounded of the First Division. After our men had got into the ditch surrounding the fort, they remained there perhaps twenty minutes before they made an entrance. In the meantime the Rebels were throwing dirt, stones and various kinds of missiles upon them. At length as a movement toward entering the fort, the gallant Logsden undertook to plant the flag of the Twelfth upon the parapet, and was killed, falling back into the ditch. The colors were then seized by Lieut. Joseph Caldwell of Company A, who leaped upon the parapet, and in attempting to plant the colors there was killed, falling also into the ditch. The flag fell inside of the fort. Then the brave boys of the Twelfth rushed to the parapet to recover their flag. They were joined by comrades of the rest of the brigade. Pouring a volley into the Rebels, the boys of the Twelfth leaped into the fort and planted their flag on the parapet - the first colors on the Rebel works. Private Joseph McCauslin, Company D, and two comrades of the 12th received the Congressional Medal of Honor for conspicuous gallantry in the assault on Fort Gregg.

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283

Publisher

35th Star Publishing

Published Date

ISBN 10

0966453417

ISBN 13

9780966453416

The Feud That Wasn’t

The Taylor Ring, Bill Sutton, John Wesley Hardin, and Violence in Texas

By: James M. Smallwood

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The Feud That Wasn’t

The Taylor Ring, Bill Sutton, John Wesley Hardin, and Violence in Texas

By: James M. Smallwood

Marauding outlaws, or violent rebels still bent on fighting the Civil War? For decades, the so-called “Taylor-Sutton feud” has been seen as a bloody vendetta between two opposing gangs of Texas gunfighters. However, historian James M. Smallwood here shows that what seemed to be random lawlessness can be interpreted as a pattern of rebellion by a loose confederation of desperadoes who found common cause in their hatred of the Reconstruction government in Texas. Between the 1850s and 1880, almost 200 men rode at one time or another with Creed Taylor and his family through a forty-five-county area of Texas, stealing and killing almost at will, despite heated and often violent opposition from pro-Union law enforcement officials, often led by William Sutton. From 1871 until his eventual arrest, notorious outlaw John Wesley Hardin served as enforcer for the Taylors. In 1874 in the streets of Comanche, Texas, on his twenty-first birthday, Hardin and two other members of the Taylor ring gunned down Brown County Deputy Charlie Webb. This cold-blooded killing—one among many—marked the beginning of the end for the Taylor ring, and Hardin eventually went to the penitentiary as a result. The Feud That Wasn’t reinforces the interpretation that Reconstruction was actually just a continuation of the Civil War in another guise, a thesis Smallwood has advanced in other books and articles. He chronicles in vivid detail the cattle rustling, horse thieving, killing sprees, and attacks on law officials perpetrated by the loosely knit Taylor ring, drawing a composite picture of a group of anti-Reconstruction hoodlums who at various times banded together for criminal purposes. Western historians and those interested in gunfighters and lawmen will heartily enjoy this colorful and meticulously researched narrative.

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Page Count

268

Publisher

Texas A&M University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1603440178

ISBN 13

9781603440172

Uncivil War

Five New Orleans Street Battles and the Rise and Fall of Radical Reconstruction

By: James K. Hogue

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Uncivil War

Five New Orleans Street Battles and the Rise and Fall of Radical Reconstruction

By: James K. Hogue

No other Reconstruction state government was as chaotic or violent as Louisiana's, located in New Orleans, the largest southern city at the time. James K. Hogue explains the unique confluence of demographics, geography, and wartime events that made New Orleans an epicenter in the upheaval of Reconstruction politics and a critical battleground in the struggle for the future of southern society. No other Reconstruction state government was as chaotic or violent as Louisiana's, located in New Orleans, the largest southern city at the time. James K. Hogue explains the unique confluence of demographics, geography, and wartime events that made New Orleans an epicenter in the upheaval of Reconstruction politics and a critical battleground in the struggle for the future of southern society. Hogue characterizes Reconstruction in Louisiana as a continuation of civil war, waged between well-organized and well-armed forces vying to control the state's government. He details five key New Orleans street battles, in which elite Confederate veterans played central roles, and gives an in-depth account of how the Republican state government raised militias and a state police force to defend against the violence. In response, a white supremacist movement arose in the mid-1870s and finally overthrew the Republicans. The occupation of Louisiana by federal troops from 1862 to 1877 was the longest of its kind in American history. Not coincidentally, Hogue argues, one of the longest unbroken periods of one-race, one-party dominance in American history followed, lasting until 1972. Uncivil War reveals that the long-term military impact of the South's occupation included twenty-five years of crippled War Department budgets inflicted by southern congressmen who feared another Reconstruction. Within Louisiana, the biracial Republican militias were dismantled, leaving blacks largely unarmed against future atrocities; at the same time, the nucleus of the state's White Leagues became the Louisiana National Guard, which defended the "Redeemer" government's repressive labor policies. White supremacist victory cast its shadow over American race relations for almost a century. Moving between national, state, and local realms, Uncivil War demystifies the interplay of force and politics during a complex period of American history.

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517

Publisher

LSU Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0807143928

ISBN 13

9780807143926

The Indian Texans

By: James M. Smallwood

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The Indian Texans

By: James M. Smallwood

Traces the history of Native Americans in Texas from prehistory to the early twenty-first century, providing information on each tribe, and including biographical sketches, illustrations, and excerpts about Indian Texas from the journals of explorer Cabeza de Vaca and others.

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174

Publisher

Texas A&M University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1585443549

ISBN 13

9781585443543

The Political Arrays of American Indian Literary History

By: James H. Cox

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The Political Arrays of American Indian Literary History

By: James H. Cox

Bringing fresh insight to a century of writing by Native Americans The Political Arrays of American Indian Literary History challenges conventional views of the past one hundred years of Native American writing, bringing Native American Renaissance and post-Renaissance writers into conversation with their predecessors. Addressing the political positions such writers have adopted, explored, and debated in their work, James H. Cox counters what he considers a “flattening” of the politics of American Indian literary expression and sets forth a new method of reading Native literature in a vexingly politicized context. Examining both canonical and lesser-known writers, Cox proposes that scholars approach these texts as “political arrays”: confounding but also generative collisions of conservative, moderate, and progressive ideas that together constitute the rich political landscape of American Indian literary history. Reviewing a broad range of genres including journalism, short fiction, drama, screenplays, personal letters, and detective fiction—by Lynn Riggs, Will Rogers, Sherman Alexie, Thomas King, Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, Winona LaDuke, Carole laFavor, and N. Scott Momaday—he demonstrates that Native texts resist efforts to be read as advocating a particular set of politics Meticulously researched, The Political Arrays of American Indian Literary History represents a compelling case for reconceptualizing the Native American Renaissance as a literary–historical constellation. By focusing on post-1968 Native writers and texts, argues Cox, critics have often missed how earlier writers were similarly entangled, hopeful, frustrated, contradictory, and unpredictable in their political engagements.

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Page Count

368

Publisher

U of Minnesota Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1452961409

ISBN 13

9781452961408

Paleoindian Societies of the Coastal Southeast

By: James S. Dunbar

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Paleoindian Societies of the Coastal Southeast

By: James S. Dunbar

The late Pleistocene-early Holocene landscape hosted more species and greater numbers of them in the Southeast compared to any other region in North America at that time. Yet James Dunbar posits that a misguided reliance on using Old World origins to validate New World evidence has stalled research in this area. Rejecting the one-size-fits-all approach to Pleistocene archaeological sites, Dunbar analyzes five areas of contextual data—stratigraphy; chronology; paleoclimate; the combined consideration of habitat, resource availability, and subsistence; and artifacts and technology—to resolve unanswered questions surrounding the Paleoindian occupation of the Americas. Through his extensive research, Dunbar demonstrates a masterful understanding of the lifeways of the region’s people and the animals they hunted, showing that the geography and diversity of food sources was unique to that period. He suggests that the most important archaeological and paleontological resources in the Americas still remain undiscovered in Florida’s karst river basins. Building a case for the wealth of information yet to be unearthed, he provides a fresh perspective on the distant past and an original way of thinking about early life on the land mass we call Florida. A volume in the Florida Museum of Natural History: Ripley P. Bullen Series

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Page Count

339

Publisher

University Press of Florida

Published Date

ISBN 10

0813065313

ISBN 13

9780813065311

The Indian Texans

By: James M. Smallwood

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The Indian Texans

By: James M. Smallwood

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174

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Texas A&M University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1585443549

ISBN 13

9781585443543

The Feud That Wasn't

The Taylor Ring, Bill Sutton, John Wesley Hardin, and Violence in Texas

By: James M. Smallwood

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The Feud That Wasn't

The Taylor Ring, Bill Sutton, John Wesley Hardin, and Violence in Texas

By: James M. Smallwood

Marauding outlaws, or violent rebels still bent on fighting the Civil War? For decades, the so-called Taylor-Sutton feud has been seen as a bloody vendetta between two opposing gangs of Texas gunfighters. However, historian James M. Smallwood here shows that what seemed to be random lawlessness can be interpreted as a pattern of rebellion by a loose confederation of desperadoes who found common cause in their hatred of the Reconstruction government in Texas.Between the 1850s and 1880, almost 200 men rode at one time or another with Creed Taylor and his family through a forty-five-county area of Texas, stealing and killing almost at will, despite heated and often violent opposition from pro-Union law enforcement officials, often led by William Sutton. From 1871 until his eventual arrest, notorious outlaw John Wesley Hardin served as enforcer for the Taylors. In 1874 in the streets of Comanche, Texas, on his twenty-first birthday, Hardin and two other members of the Taylor ring gunned down Brown County Deputy Charlie Webb. This cold-blooded killing - one among many - marked the beginning of the end for the Taylor ring, and Hardin eventually went to the penitentiary as a result. The Feud That Wasn't reinforces the interpretation that Reconstruction was actually just a continuation of the Civil War in another guise, a thesis Smallwood has advanced in other books and articles. He chronicles in vivid detail the cattle rustling, horse thieving, killing sprees, and attacks on law officials perpetrated by the loosely knit Taylor ring, drawing a composite picture of a group of anti-Reconstruction hoodlums who at various times banded together for criminal purposes. Western historians and those interested in gunfighters and lawmen will heartily enjoy this colorful and meticulously researched narrative.

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Page Count

256

Publisher

Texas A&M University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

160344386X

ISBN 13

9781603443869

Book's by James M. Smallwood

The Devil's Triangle

The Devil's Triangle

Murder and Mayhem

Murder and Mayhem

Texas Divided

Texas Divided

History of the Twelfth West Virginia Volunteer Infantry

History of the Twelfth West Virginia Volunteer Infantry

The Feud That Wasn’t

The Feud That Wasn’t

Uncivil War

Uncivil War

The Indian Texans

The Indian Texans

The Political Arrays of American Indian Literary History

The Political Arrays of American Indian Literary History

Paleoindian Societies of the Coastal Southeast

Paleoindian Societies of the Coastal Southeast

The Indian Texans

The Indian Texans

The Feud That Wasn't

The Feud That Wasn't

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