Booknotes: The Texas Lowcountry

New Arrival:

• The Texas Lowcountry: Slavery and Freedom on the Gulf Coast, 1822–1895 by John R. Lundberg (TAMU Pr, 2024).

In the Deep South and Texas, fertile coastal deltas often developed into regions of concentrated slave labor-based agricultural economies. An in-depth study of the history of one such geographical area is John Lundberg's The Texas Lowcountry: Slavery and Freedom on the Gulf Coast, 1822–1895, which "examines slavery and Reconstruction in a region of Texas he terms the lowcountry—an area encompassing the lower reaches of the Brazos and Colorado Rivers and their tributaries as they wend their way toward the Gulf of Mexico through what is today Brazoria, Fort Bend, Matagorda, and Wharton Counties."

Even though foreign-born settlers, in particular a large influx of Germans starting in the 1830s, established themselves in ethnic pockets across much of central Texas and elsewhere, those newcomers were relatively few in the lowcountry. More from the description: "95 percent of the white population of the lowcountry came from other parts of the United States, predominantly the slaveholding states of the American South. By 1861, more than 70 percent of this regional population were enslaved people—the heaviest such concentration west of the Mississippi. These demographics established the Texas Lowcountry as a distinct region in terms of its population and social structure."

Lundberg presents his study in three parts. The first engages with recent scholarship that envisions and interprets vast regions of the American Southwest as political, economic, and cultural borderlands rife with both cooperation and conflict. Indeed, the section "explores the development of the region as a borderland, an area of competing cultures and peoples, between 1822 and 1840." Part Two is "arranged topically and chronicles the history of the enslavers and the enslaved in the lowcountry between 1840 and 1865." I skimmed over the section to see which familiar Civil War faces popped up, and saw that Lundberg addresses Albert Sidney Johnston's holdings in the region. You might recall that Timothy Smith's very recent military biography of Johnston framed his unsuccessful Texas land speculation as one of many examples in Johnston's life of attempting to gain status, or recover lost fortune, through high-risk ventures and decisions, none of which tended to work out for him. The third section "focuses on the experiences of freed people in the region during the Reconstruction era, which ended in the lowcountry in 1895."

"In closely examining this unique pocket of Texas," Lundberg's The Texas Lowcountry "provides a new and much needed region-specific study of the culture of enslavement and the African American experience."