Matthew Cox (c1735-1804) was a son of Matthew Cox (c1710-c1750) who is mentioned in the will of William Cox (c1685-1754) which was probated 19 March 1754 in Essex county, Virginia and mentions his grandson Matthew, son of his deceased son named Matthew Cox. William Cox (c1685-1754) may be the William mentioned in the will of Matthew Cox (c1660-1734) dated 15 January 1733 and recorded 18 March 1734 in Goochland county, Virginia.

This sweeping, richly evocative study examines the origins and legacies of a flourishing captive exchange economy within and among native American and Euramerican communities throughout the Southwest Borderlands from the Spanish colonial era to the end of the nineteenth century. Indigenous and colonial traditions of capture, servitude, and kinship met and meshed in the borderlands, forming a "slave system" in which victims symbolized social wealth, performed services for their masters, and produced material goods under the threat of violence. Slave and livestock raiding and trading among Apaches, Comanches, Kiowas, Navajos, Utes, and Spaniards provided labor resources, redistributed wealth, and fostered kin connections that integrated disparate and antagonistic groups even as these practices renewed cycles of violence and warfare. Always attentive to the corrosive effects of the "slave trade" on Indian and colonial societies, the book also explores slavery's centrality in intercultural trade, alliances, and "communities of interest" among groups often antagonistic to Spanish, Mexican, and American modernizing strategies. The extension of the moral and military campaigns of the American Civil War to the Southwest in a regional "war against slavery" brought differing forms of social stability but cost local communities much of their economic vitality and cultural flexibility.