Texas Cotton and Confederate Finance, Volume 3

L. Tuffly Ellis retired as an associate professor of Texas history from the University of Texas at Austin, where he earned his doctoral degree. A fourth-generation Texan, he served as the director of the Texas State Historical Association from 1977 to 1985 and also as the longtime editor of the Southwestern Historical Quarterly. His research focused on the cotton trade in Texas, about which he wrote several academic articles. Richard B. McCaslin, retired TSHA Professor of Texas History at the University of North Texas, now serves as Texas state historian and director of publications for the Texas State Historical Association. He is the author or editor of twenty-two books. These include Tainted Breeze: The Great Hanging at Gainesville, Texas, October 1862, which won the Tullis Prize and an AASLH commendation; Lee in the Shadow of Washington, which received the Laney Prize and Slatten Award and was nominated for a Pulitzer; At the Heart of Texas: One Hundred Years of the Texas State Historical Association, 1897-1997, which earned the Award of Merit from the Texas Philosophical Society; Fighting Stock: John S. "Rip" Ford of Texas, which received the Pate Award and Bates Award; and Texas Ranger Captain William L. Wright (UNT Press), which was awarded a San Antonio Conservation Society Award.

"Rather than focusing solely on military operations or the relatively minor skirmishes that occurred along the Gulf Coast, Ellis and McCaslin direct their attention to the economic, social, and political dynamics that shaped the lived experiences of the civilian population. In doing so they illuminate aspects of the Civil War that are often overlooked in conventional narratives but are arguably more representative of the issues that at least indirectly shaped the experiences of most Texans during the war, where money and business were built on the foundation of cotton production and processing. The challenge of how to convert cotton, perhaps the one thing that Texas and the Trans-Mississippi had plenty of, into the cash, raw materials, or munitions necessary to continue the war eventually became an all-consuming problem for both military leaders and public officials. The scope and depth of this study are unparalleled, marking it as a foundational contribution to the historiography of Civil War-era Texas."-Andrew W. Hall, author of Civil War Blockade Running on the Texas Coast "This is the first book to explore the subject of cotton and Confederate policy to such a great extent. Cotton played an incredibly important part in the war west of the Mississippi, and its significance and the way military and government officials tried to harness it for military and political purposes have never been covered in depth before. The authors do a great job of tying together topics like blockade running and cotton policy and telling a broader and more important story."-Edward T. Cotham Jr., author of Battle on the Bay: The Civil War Struggle for Galveston and Sabine Pass: The Confederacy's Thermopylae "Finally! Richard McCaslin, the Texas state historian, has picked up the unfinished work of his mentor. Together they have untangled the Gordian knot that is the murky doings of the various cotton bureaus, agents, and efforts to finance the rump of the Confederacy that was hanging on west of the Mississippi. There is a renaissance of writing on Texas in the Civil War, and this work will be a crucial element."-Donald S. Frazier, director of The Texas Center at Schreiner University and author of Blood on the Bayou: Vicksburg, Port Hudson, and the Trans-Mississippi