For your second library assignment, each of you selected a past historian of Texas to see what he or she had to say about Dowling and the Battle of Sabine Pass. Only a couple of you found that these topics were not mentioned in the texts you looked at, which testifies to how often Dowling and the battle are mentioned even in very general Texas history books. I also noticed a couple of themes in your posts.
The Numbers Game
As many of you noticed, it’s striking that the critical “numbers” involved in the Battle of Sabine Pass vary so wildly across books and even across editions of the same book. How many Union transports were involved–17? 20? 23? How many Union prisoners were taken–250, 315, 350? How many men did Dowling have in the fort–42? 46? 47? These are all questions on which the authors of the books you read differ. And they also differ in their reports of the number of Union troops involved in the battle. As I mentioned in a comment on Kat’s post, determining that number is actually more difficult than you might think. It doesn’t help matters that different writers have proposed figures ranging from 1,500 to 4,000–5,000–6,000–and even, in the case of one Confederate veteran who wrote a history of Texas, 15,000! These disparities raise some dilemmas that your groups will need to resolve about how you intend to describe the battle. They also indicate, perhaps, that writers of Dowling have often simply relied on other chroniclers to get their figures instead of rigorously examining the primary sources–a pattern that has perhaps allowed popular myth and memory to have particular influence on the way historians describe the battle.
The Significance of the Battle
While the writers you examined don’t all agree on the numbers, it is striking that so many of them mention the numbers of the forces involved in the battle. What that indicates to me is that many historians have written as though the primary significance of the battle lies primarily in its lop-sided nature. Certainly, that was what Dowling’s early champions like Jefferson Davis believed–they thought what made the battle most significance was that it was a “David versus Goliath” victory. In a way, what these histories show is that these early descriptions of the battle succeeded in shaping the way the battle has been remembered ever after. It’s almost de rigueur for historians to mention the numbers in the battle, which of course is exactly how Davis wanted the significance of the battle to be remembered (see DD0001). Meanwhile, as many of you noted, other potential interpretations of the battle’s significance–like the fact that it prevented Union armies from liberating slaves in Texas as they were elsewhere–are hardly ever mentioned. Some of the texts do repeat the idea that the battle affected the credit rating of the United States and the stock market; from your collective research, it appears that this claim was taken originally from a contemporary article in the New York Herald and may have been first reported in the 1943 edition of Rupert Norval Richardson’s Texas history textbook, before being picked up by other books published in 1968, 1971, and 1976. It seems odd that this claim, apparently based on the slender evidence of one newspaper article, has gotten so much play, since the impact of the battle on the fortunes of slavery in Texas seem like they would be more significant than a temporary dip in the stock market. Yet the larger national context of the war–including slavery–doesn’t seem to have appeared often in the excerpts you all found, and even when it did appear, the national picture was usually brought up in brief discussions about the causes of the war instead of being connected to the battle itself and its consequences.
These reflections pose another dilemma that you and your group may have to settle as you make your projects: how will you describe the significance of the battle, if indeed it deserves to be called significant? As you answer that question, it might be worth checking out Stephanie’s reflections on the book she examined by David McComb:
I personally was surprised to see that he did not make changes to the whole book. As professor emeritus of history at Colorado State University, it would seem that McComb would recognize that over the 20 years between his two editions, scholarship about the history of the South has changed and grown dramatically. It was disappointing to see that he did not show those changes in his new edition.
Whatever McComb’s reason for leaving his editions relatively the same, Stephanie’s comment raises a question for all of you: should Dowling’s story be told differently in light of some of the scholarship you have read this semester–by Manning, Levine, Berlin, McPherson, Hahn, and others? If this scholarship had been around earlier, would the memory of Dowling and his significance have been different?
The Significance of the Civil War
A final point that many of you made was that the significance of the Civil War itself seemed to be downplayed in many of the histories you’ve read. Renee, Courtney, Stephanie, Alex, and Victor all expressed some surprise to find that their books devoted so little attention to the whole conflict and seemed to race past it, spending more time talking about the Texas Revolution or the postwar period. This in itself is an interesting finding. Does it suggest a larger tendency of Texas historians to downplay the war, its causes, and its consequences? It’s striking that the books that Courtney and Clarissa looked at both seemed to devote some time to mentioning Unionist resistance to the Confederacy; is the attention given to that topic out of proportion to the extensiveness of Unionism, and if so, why do you think writers go out of their way to talk about Sam Houston’s Unionism instead of about the positions of, say, Governor Frank Lubbock–who was in charge when the Battle of Sabine Pass was fought?