At the end of the Civil War, Texans existed in a world with an uncertain 
future. 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, nine years later in 1874, Texas 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 have 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 examines the 
character of violence in the state, as well as the social and economic 
forces that shaped the response to Reconstruction.

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

_________________________________________________________

CARL H. MONEYHON, a professor of history at the University of 
Arkansas at Little Rock, is a specialist on the Civil War and 
Reconstruction. The author of Republicanism in Reconstruction
Texas, he holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and is a
Fellow of the Texas State Historical Association.


Number Fourteen: Texas A&M Southwestern Studies


What people are saying about this book

". . . most comprehensive study to date of Texas' Reconstruction."
—The Journal of Southern History

"This is a splendid volume that should be the first work individulas 
consult when seeking to understand Reconstruction in Texas."
—Western Historical Quarterly, Spring 2006 

"Carl E. Moneyhon provides both a useful synthesis of the past few 
decades' work on Reconstruction and a well-written  corrective to still 
prevalent notions about that era . . . this book richly deserves to be 
read as a corrective to a flawed collective memory; a cautionary tale 
of the difficulty in achieving social, economic, and political change in 
Texas, and a warning of the ultimate cost in human misery of 
conservative domination."—Southern Historical Quarterly, October 
2005

". . . clear and readable . . . by one of the best scholars writing on
Reconstruction in Texas at this time. Thus the work will become 
the standard history of the topic. . . ." —Alwyn Barr, Texas Tech
University

". . . a pioneer work . . . Moneyhon has done a great service for
Texas historians and Southern historians by distilling much of the
new revisionists' works on the subject."—James M. Smallwood,
Professor Emeritus, Oklahoma State University