baum2012

@InCollection{ baum2012,
	crossref = {howell2012},
	author = {Dale Baum},
	title = {'The Old Hero of Many Cowardly and Bloody Murders': Scalawag Gang Leader {B}en {B}rown},
	pages = {153--186},
	year = 2012,
}

Ben Brown was “one of the most notorious gang leaders in east central Texas,” yet he has been largely forgotten. According to Baum this is because he fails to fit in with the Romanticized Lost Cause mythology of noble bandits who defended the South against Yankee conquerors. Instead, he was “a southern Unionist who cooperated with the federal army and radical Republican officeholders and even served for a brief period as a hired gun for the Freedmen’s Bureau” (153). Ironically, however, his use of vigilante violence (which was directed at black suspected criminals as well as white) contributed to the making of a lynching culture and undermined radical Reconstruction.

Baum presents Brown as a man who doesn’t fit easily into any of the historiographical frameworks for understanding Reconstruction violence in Texas. The violent episode for which he became most famous, the murder of Dr. J. M. Maxwell (whose wife was a Brashear), involved a dispute among “men whom anti-Reconstruction Democrats disliked.”

As p. 174 puts it:

Neither the discredited legends depicting blacks as an incapacitated race victimized by carpetbagger manipulation, nor the revisionist historiographical turning poinst of the 1960s, provide an interpretive framework to explain Ben’s career as a scalawag vigilante leader.

Interestingly for the research on Refugeed Slaves, Brown appears to have developed relationships with some refugee planters in the area through a dry-goods store he operated, providing “protective services” to his customers on the side. His defense of black laborers often seemed to be those laborers who were hired by his customers.