Helen Dupuy, a French-speaking teenager living at the Sleepy 
Hollow Plantation on Bayou Lafourche, Louisiana, noted with horror 
the coming of invaders. "The first Yankee gunboats passed 
Donaldsonville May 4 at 11 A.M.," she wrote in her diary. Her home 
lay just a few miles from the Mississippi River, and word quickly 
arrived that Union sailors were confiscating sugar, cotton, and other 
contraband of war. The realities of her new situation soon became 
apparent—and ominous: "Then began the most awful pillaging."

    Award-winning author Donald S. Frazier returns to the field of 
Civil War history with keen turn of phrase and enthralling story-
telling with the release of Fire in the Cane Field: The Federal 
Invasion of Louisiana and Texas, January 1861–January 1863. 
Beginning with the spasms of secession in the Pelican State, Frazier 
weaves a stirring tale of bravado, reaction, and war as he describes 
the consequences of disunion for the hapless citizens of Louisiana. 
The army and navy campaigns he portrays weave a tale of the 
Federal Government's determination to suppress the newborn 
Confederacy—and nearly succeeding—by putting ever-increasing 
pressure on its adherents from New Orleans to Galveston. The 
surprising triumph of Texan troops on their home soil in early 1863 
proved to be a decisive reverse to Union ambitions and doomed the 
region to even bloodier destruction to come.

    This bracing new work, ten years in the making, will usher in a 
chronological string of four books on the Civil War in Louisiana and 
Texas as Frazier presents fresh sources on new topics in a series of 
captivating narratives. Titles to follow in his innovative Louisiana 
quadrille include Thunder Across the Swamp: The Fight for the 
Lower Mississippi, February 1863–May 1863; Blood on the Bayou: 
The Campaigns of Tom Green's Texans, June 1863–February 1864; 
and Death at the Landing: The Contest for the Red River and the 
Collapse of Confederate Louisiana, March 1864–June 1865.

_________________________________________________________

DONALD S. FRAZIER is Professor of History at McMurry 
University in Abilene, Texas, and author of Blood and Treasure: 
Confederate Empire in the Southwest, published by Texas A&M 
University Press. His other works include Cottonclads: The Battle 
of Galveston and the Defense of the Texas Coast, an edited work, 
The U.S. and Mexico at War: Nineteenth Century Expansionism and 
Conflict, and as co-author Frontier Texas: History of a Borderland 
1780–1880 and The Texas You Expect: The Story of the Buffalo 
Gap Historic Village.


Also by the Author



COTTONCLADS

978-1-886661-09-7 PAPER

$11.95
BLOOD AND TREASURE

978-0-89096-732-4 PAPER 

$21.95

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