As Charles Frazier's novel "Cold Mountain" dramatized, dissenters from the Confederacy lived in mortal danger across the South. In scattered pockets from the Carolinas to the frontier in Texas, some men clung to a belief in the Union or an unwillingness to preserve the slaveholding Confederacy, and they died at the hands of their own neighbors. "Brush Men and Vigilantes" tells the story of how dissent, fear, and economics developed into mob violence in a corner of Texas--the Sulphur Forks river valley northeast of Dallas.
Authors David Pickering and Judy Falls have combed through court...