Booknotes: Texas and the Civil War

New Arrival:

• Texas and the Civil War: New Perspectives by Carl H. Moneyhon (UNT Press, 2026).

This looks like a new survey history of Civil War Texas, a major goal of which is to center the most recent scholarship and highlight the most prominent current trends in research and writing. Carl Moneyhon's Texas and the Civil War: New Perspectives also pushes back against the popular notion that Civil War disruption of the Texas home front and society at large was minimal in comparison to the widespread suffering, want, and destruction the war inflicted upon the other Confederate states.

Establishing the background for what is the follow, the study begins during the late-antebellum years. "With deep reliance on primary sources, Moneyhon first examines the set of ideas about the North, enslaved people, and slavery that developed in Texas during the 1850s that provided the framework for secession, war, and military mobilization."

Undoubtedly influenced by the works of Charles Grear and others in addition to his own research, Moneyhon also "explores who joined the Confederate armies, why they continued to fight despite desperate conditions, and how their experiences affected them."

The critical importance of the cross-border cotton trade in both supplying and financing the Confederate war effort in Texas and the rest of the Confederate Trans-Mississippi Department has been deeply investigated in the recent literature. These previously "overlooked questions of finance and supply provide the focus of two chapters." Indeed, a book devoted entirely to the topic of Civil War Texas cotton trade and finance was released from the same publisher and at the same time as this one. That new volume will be covered here on the site soon.

Civil War-era borderlands comprise another line of scholarly investigation that has received quite a bit of attention from professional historians in recent years. Much of it centers on social, political, military, and economic relationships, both cooperative and hostile, among the various peoples and groups inhabiting northern Mexico, Texas, and the rest of the Desert Southwest. In this book, Moneyhon "considers the question of frontiers, bearing in mind the existence of multiple frontiers rather than simply that of the state’s western and northwestern boundaries."

Internal divisions and their impact on Civil War Texas are also scrutinized, as the author "investigates the breakdown of Confederate consensus and the development of anti-Confederate sentiment and movements. How the war affected family and class are topics that have received considerable recent attention and are also explored herein."

Discussion of military events is interspersed, but the great bulk of it is grouped together in a single chapter that "examines military history and Union activities in Texas, considering both the effect these actions had on the people of the state and the impact of defeat on soldiers and civilians."