In
Texas, as in the rest of the Confederacy, the Reconstruction
Era between 1865 and 1877 saw little more than a continuation of the Civil War
in a new guise. The Union won the first phase of the war that pitted professional
armies against each other between 1861 and 1865, but the South won the second
phase that developed into guerrilla warfare.
In Texas,
terrorist groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan, operated in at least seventy-seven
counties, including much of East Texas.
The number of men belonging to such groups were legion.
Returning Confederate
veterans organized outlaw gangs that functioned much like the terrorist groups,
their goal being to continue the war and to take the battle to Yankee occupiers,
native white Unionists, and their allies, the slaves freed by Abraham Lincoln’s
Emancipation Proclamation.
The proclamation was applied to Texas
on June 19, 1865, at Galveston,
a day still celebrated as “Juneteenth.”
In Texas, the Democratic Party, the party of secession and war, used the
terrorist groups to retake power and defeat the process of Reconstruction.
“The
Devil’s Triangle,” a new book by James M. Smallwood, Kenneth W. Howell and Carol
C. Taylor, provides a fascinating look at this turbulent era.
Ben Bickerstaff,
a Confederate soldier who spent time in a Union prison camp, founded terrorist
Klan groups in at least two northern East
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, they brought chaos and death
to the “Devil’s Triangle,” the northern East
Texas region where they created one disaster after another.
The incessant
violence spelled the defeat of Reconstruction policies that might have transformed
the South into a progressive region.
Instead, the racist, violent South
remained the nation’s number one political, social and economic problem for the
next hundred years.
“The Devil’s Triangle” can be purchased from the
East Texas Historical Association in Nacogdoches at 936-468-2407 or via e-mail
from amcdonald@sfasu.edu. Proceeds from the book’s sales will help fund new East
Texas books. |
