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History buffs will want to read ‘compelling’ story
By Mark Lardas
Correspondent
Published October 18, 2009
“Fire in the Cane Field,” by Donald S. Frazier, State House Press, 384 pages, $39.95.
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What was the first Confederate state restored to the Union?
Not West Virginia. Properly speaking, it was never a Confederate state.
It was the part of Virginia that remained within the United States. Rather, it was Louisiana.
The core of Louisiana was captured in early 1862 by a Union naval expedition commanded by David Farragut, another Virginian who remained with the United States.
It was part of a chain of events that almost won the war for the North in the spring of 1862.
Instead, it opened a protracted campaign that lasted most of the rest of the Civil War.
Eventually, a Union legislature was installed in Louisiana.
The Civil War in Louisiana and Texas devolved into sideshow, albeit a bloody one, as the decisive theaters moved east.
That opening phase of the Civil War in the Gulf is the subject of “Fire in the Cane Field,” by Donald S. Frazier.
It covers the opening of the Civil War in Louisiana and Texas — from secession to the Battle of Galveston.
The book is the first of a four-volume study of the Civil War in these states that Frazier plans to write.
As with Frazier’s earlier “Blood and Treasure,” the unifying thread is Sibley’s Brigade.
Much of “Fire in the Cane Field” takes place before Frazier’s main actors’ arrival. It is no less fascinating or intriguing for their absence.
The book documents a series of close-run events that could have tipped the decisive balance in the Civil War either way.
Fraizer shows how minor changes in a few key battles and raids in this theater could have yielded either a Union or a Confederate victory in 1862.
One example will suffice. Farragut almost captured Vicksburg in May 1862. The town was undefended except for batteries covering the river.
Two regiments of Union infantry could have taken it. At a minimum, they could have destroyed the batteries, even if they could not hold the town.
Farragut had no troops. There were none to spare when he went north. He could do nothing once Vicksburg called his bluff.
Incidents like this — and the book abounds in them — are one reason “Fire in the Cane Field” makes compelling reading.
Civil War buffs will want to read it, as will anyone interested in absorbing history.
Mark Lardas, an engineer, freelance writer, amateur historian and model-maker, lives in League City and is the author of two books on the Civil War.
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