Texas after the Civil War: The Struggle of Reconstruction (Texas A&M Southwestern Studies)

As the Civil War ended, the South—and especially Texas, which had escaped the military ravages of the war—stood poised on the brink of a new social, economic, and political order. Congressional Reconstruction, the Freedmen’s Bureau, the U.S. Army, and a Republican state administration all presaged change. Nonetheless, Texas in 1874 more closely resembled the Texas of 1861 than anyone might have predicted at war’s end. Reconstruction had remade little.

In Texas after the Civil War, Carl H. Moneyhon reconsiders the reasons Reconstruction failed to live up to its promise. He shows that the period was not one of corruption and irresponsible government, as earlier studies had argued; nor was the Republican regime of Edmund J. Davis devoid of accomplishments. Rather, the fact that the Civil War had shaken but not destroyed the antebellum community made the resistance to changes in government and society even greater than elsewhere in the South. Moneyhon vividly examines the character of violence in the state, as well as the social and economic forces that shaped the response to Reconstruction.

Clearly and engagingly written, masterful in its survey of the last fifty years of research on the era, this book will stand as the definitive synthesis and interpretation of Reconstruction in Texas for years to come.