A surprising number of Texans disagreed with their state's decision to secede from the Union in 1860. Most of them immigrants from Northern or Border states, many had settled in Cooke and surrounding counties in the years before the Civil War. Though they abided by the decision to secede, they disagreed openly with some of the Confederacy's laws, such as the rule exempting certain slave-owners from military service.
James Lemuel Clark, eighteen at the outbreak of the Civil War, was the son of one of those men. These memoirs, which he wrote in his seventies, recount his involvement in a...