richter2012

@InCollection{ richter2012,
	crossref = {howell2012},
	author = {William L. Richter},
	title = {"Shoot or Get Out of the War!": The Murder of Texas Freedmen's Bureau Agent William G. Kirkman by Cullen Baker---and the Historians},
	pages = {63--111},
	year = 2012,
}

Richter examines the work and death of Bowie County SAC William Gilbert Kirkman, though the study is clearly tinged by a long-running personal conflict between Richter and Barry Crouch, whose comments about other historians Richter calls “fatuous” (see p. 65 and note 6). Richter’s overall point seems to be that Kirkman was not the far-sighted progressive other historians have suggested, and also that the opposition he faced from local whites consisted far more often of threat and “foot-dragging” (65) than actual physical violence, which Kirkman experienced “only three times: when brigands attacked his command once in Boston, when he and his patrol were ambushed on the road, and when he was murdered” (65).

At the same time, Richter says that the pervasive violence against black persons in the county show “the adverse conditions under which Bureau men operated in Texas” and the “scope of the opposition that plagued the whole federal agenda for reconstructing Texas” (66).

p. 68: example of a black woman, Rachel Leeper, resisting an employer’s command three times

Richter’s main point about Kirkman seems to be that he wasn’t very effective as a local agent because of his go-it-alone procedures (which often led to fluctuating support and reprimands from headquarters in Galveston), and that his death was prompted as much by the lawlessness of brigands like Cullen Baker and Kirkman’s ways of dealing with them.