The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 105, July 2001 - April, 2002 Page: 709
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Book Reviews
ly five months of formal education expressed himself so powerfully is evidence of
an exceptionally keen mind.
While his views on slavery and the North may have been in line with those of his
neighbors, Lincecum no doubt lost friends with his dark views on religion. Lince-
cum referred to himself as an "infidel." Mourning the passing of old friends, he
took no hope that he would see them in the afterlife:
No, no, no they are gone to be seen no more, in this, or any other worlds. As to the the bible
promise, that we shall be renewed and fitted for the enjoyment of a higher life, it is as phys-
ically impossible, as it is philosophically foolish (p. 9o).
The editors of the book, Jerry Bryan Lincecum (a sixth-generation Lincecum),
Edward Hake Phillips, and Peggy A. Redshaw have painstakingly footnoted Lince-
cum's letters, so that virtually no obscure reference goes unexplained.
Gideon Lzncecum's Sword makes the rawness of the Civil War real for twenty-first-
century readers.
University of North Texas John Mark Dempsey
Brush Men and Vigilantes: Civil War Dissent in Texas. By David Pickering and Judy
Falls. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2000. Pp. xxv+223. List
of illustrations, series editor's foreword, foreword, preface, acknowledg-
ments, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN o-89096-923-X. $24.95, cloth.)
On March 14, 1946, the Dallas Morning News published an intriguing story of a
retired farmer in northeast Texas who was anxious to apologize "for the stern han-
dling against men who agreed with Gen. Sam Houston in 1862." Some of these
men, the farmer readily confessed, were hanged. "These men shouldn't have
been hanged," he continued, "they were just expressing their own opinions, and
they had a right" (p. 144). Needless to say, the Civil War in Texas left deep emo-
tional scars.
Despite a considerable volume of new and exciting scholarship relating to a sur-
prising volume of dissent in Civil War Texas (such as Richard B. McCaslin's Taint-
ed Breeze: The Great Hanging in Gainesville, Texas, 1862), much of what happened
on the home front in the Lone Star State during the war has received little schol-
arly note. Brush Men and Vigilantes: Civil War Dissent zn Texas goes a long way to-
ward helping to bridge this historical gap by ably recalling a number of dramatic
and tragic events that occurred in northeast Texas, particularly in Fannin, Lamar,
Hunt, and Hopkins Counties. Here in the Sulphur Forks watershed, "Union men"
or "brush men," many of them individuals from the Upper South who had settled
in northeast Texas and who owned few, if any, slaves hid out in the numerous and
virtually impenetrable thickets in the area and lived in mortal fear of Confederate
authorities.
Deeply grounded in a wealth of court records, newspaper articles, letters and
other valuable primary sources, the late David Pickering, career journalist with
the Corpus Christi Caller-Times, and Judy Falls, award-winning high school teacher,
detail a series of horrifying vigilante hangings. Besides the hanging of sixteen2002
709
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 105, July 2001 - April, 2002, periodical, 2002; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101222/m1/765/?rotate=270: accessed March 28, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.