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Book Review
| Mark M. Carroll, Homesteads Ungovernable: Families, Sex, Race, and the Law in Frontier Texas, 1823–1860, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001. $40.00 cloth (ISBN 0-292-71227-8); $19.95 paper (0-292-71228-6).
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| In Homesteads Ungovernable, Mark Carroll skillfully examines the intertwined racial and sexual politics underlying property relations and legal systems in antebellum Texas. Viewed through the lens of legal sources covering matrimony, divorce, adultery, informal sexual unions, and bigamy, Texas appears in the four decades before the Civil War as a place of both frontier instability and significant legal innovations. Ultimately, Carroll argues that tumultuous frontier settlement patterns in antebellum Texas led to more equitable gender relations among Anglo-Texans. |
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Land policy is at the core of Carroll's argument. In frontier Texas, families could acquire substantially larger portions of land than individuals, leading to, in Carroll's words, "hastily arranged and unstable unions" (xviii). Loosely monitored communities and a marked Anglo male ethos of "rampant individualism" created further instability (xviii). |
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Within this context of instability and loose social organization, Carroll is careful to note, Anglo-Texas racial supremacy was rarely challenged. Antebellum Texas was a place of profound cultural mixing, with relatively prominent Native American, Mexican, African American slave, and Anglo populations. This exceptional cultural heterogeneity is given ample attention in Carroll's account. Chapters one through three are devoted to discussions of a range of cross-cultural sexual encounters, including intermarriages between Anglo men and Tejano and Native American women and Anglo slave owners and "black female consorts" (74). |
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While racial hierarchies remained in place in Texas, Carroll argues that frontier conditions led to far more flexible gender relations than elsewhere in the South. The second half of the book develops further the theme of frontier instability and its effect on Anglo gender relations. Concerned that the dissolution of families could further disrupt already tenuous social cohesion, Texas justices placed a high priority on domestic stability, even if that stability required toleration of sexual indiscretions on the part of frontier women. Adultery by Anglo women, for instance, received far less disapproval in the eyes of the law than elsewhere in the South. As a result, Texas jurisprudence regarding gender was, according to Carroll, one of the most progressive in the country. Antebellum frontier conditions in Texas thus were fundamental in the granting of greater freedom for Anglo women. |
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Carroll is most persuasive when dissecting the intricate legal decisions governing sexual intimacies and domestic relations in Texas. He explains several cases in great detail, deftly balancing the case's narrative tale with its legal implications. Justices of Texas high courts emerge here with special clarity, as "instrumentalist justices" who did not hesitate to adapt traditional doctrines to new contexts and refashion the law to conform to Texas's peculiar demography (165). |
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Carroll is also to be commended for his commitment to investigate in detail the convergence of sexual and gender relations in Texas with antebellum racial politics. He is not content simply to note in passing the presence of cultural mixing. Rather, Carroll offers an exemplary analysis of the pivotal role of race and racial differences within sexual and gender politics. |
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Finally the book conveys an impressive amount of information for its brief length, a testament to Carroll's concise writing and narrative economy. While a bit too dense for all but the brightest of undergraduate students, the book would be suitable for graduate seminars in a range of fields, including legal history, women's history, and the history of the American West. |
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| Pablo Mitchell
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| Oberlin College |
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