ramsdell1910

@Book{ ramsdell1910,
	author = {Charles William Ramsdell},
	title = {Reconstruction in Texas},
	address = {New York},
	publisher = {Columbia University Press},
	year = 1910,
}

https://archive.org/details/reconstructionin00rams

This opening of the book illustrates very succinctly a couple of longstanding (and often contradictory) stories about the Civil War in Texas that still remain powerful in the popular imagination and some scholarship:

1. First, that Texas “lay well outside the circle of conflict,” while at the same time noting that the conflict directly impacted Texas by making slaves “more plentiful than ever before” (p. 23).
2. Second, that only two possible categories of Texans really existed: unwavering Unionists, or loyal Southerners who “who gave to the Confederacy an allegiance as sincere and as strenuous as did the original secessionists” (p. 22). Ramsdell tends to lump those who “escaped active service by securing appointment upon special details near home” in with the Unionists (p. 22), even though a few pages later he acknowledges that the Confederate state government in many ways encouraged speculation and directed new money into “the pockets of favored speculators, ‘exempts,’ ‘details’ and officers” (p. 24).