Booknotes: Texan in Blue

New Arrival:

• Texan in Blue: Captain Francis Asbury Vaughan of the First Texas Cavalry, USA by Richard B. McCaslin & J. Wayne Stewart (TSHA, 2025).

For all the recent scholarly attention that has been lavished upon Southern Unionists and their impact on the Civil War, a full regimental history of the First Texas Cavalry (Union) remains unwritten. Carl Moneyhon's biography of the regiment's colonel, Edmund J. Davis, contains only a single chapter recounting the whole of his Civil War career. Though not as highly ranked, Francis Vaughan was another Lone Star Unionist officer who served in that regiment, his life and Civil War military service the subject of Richard McCaslin and J. Wayne Stewart's Texan in Blue: Captain Francis Asbury Vaughan of the First Texas Cavalry, USA.

From the description: "Francis Asbury Vaughan left his home in Guadalupe County, Texas on July 4, 1862, to fight in the Civil War. But he did not join a Confederate unit. Unlike twenty-one of his brothers and cousins, and most white male Texans who fought in that conflict, he became a captain in the First Texas Cavalry, USA, the best-known Union outfit from the Lone Star State."

Fortunately for posterity, Vaughan did not allow his own perspective of the war and his part in it to go unwritten. He "recorded some of his wartime experiences in what he called a memorandum, which remains in the possession of his descendants along with other treasured records concerning him and his relatives. These documents are the foundation for this book, which provides a unique insight into the ideals and actions of a Texan who not only served for three years as a Union officer but afterward became a Republican for the remaining three decades of his life in Texas."

As recounted in the book, Vaughan also had a significant impact on Texas's postwar history. "As a Texan in blue, a delegate to the Constitutional Convention of 1868, a federal appointee and elected local official several times over, and a successful businessman and father, Vaughan established a legacy that offers useful perspectives not only on him, but on the events that surrounded and involved him."