| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Feud That Wasn't: The Taylor Ring, Bill Sutton, John Wesley Hardin, and Violence in Texas. By James M. Smallwood. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2008. xxiv, 229 pp. $29.95, ISBN 978-1-60344-017-2.)
With potent scholarship and spirited writing this volume revisits the famed Taylor-Sutton affray in Reconstruction-era South Texas. James M. Smallwood, a veteran student of the Old Southwest, has probed deeply into various archives in Washington and Austin as well as the formidable collections at Victoria College (Texas) to build the argument that the troubles did not constitute a feud but became a law enforcement problem. The violent shoot-outs between opposing factions are set within the political milieu that dominated the area and encompassed a huge cast of characters.	1
The Taylor gang, descendants of Josiah Taylor, who first arrived in Texas in 1812 from Virginia, and the progeny of his two sons, Creed and Pitkin, make up the central faction. From their base in DeWitt, Karnes, Wilson, and surrounding counties, the Taylors and their cohorts ranged over a wide area that Smallwood dubs Taylor country. Early on, the ring engaged in cattle rustling, horse thievery, harassment of native Unionists, the killing of U.S. Army personnel, threats against Freedmen's Bureau agents, and the intimidation as well as murder of freedpeople. They thus wrapped themselves in the Confederate flag, a strategy openly condoned by Democratic politicians and editors attempting to reestablish political control after Appomattox.	. . .

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