This study of 364 Hill Country men is modeled after "Webster's New Biographical Dictionary." Some of the entries are short, such as Frank Murara who appears only on the 1890 Veterans Schedule as a Union veteran, possibly an itinerant railroad worker staying at a hotel in Comfort. Some entries are longer, such as Thomas Ingenhuett who served in both Confederate and Union units and whose pension application describes the 1864 Battle of Las Rucias and his subsequent escape through Mexico. Some entries contain unexpected information, such as J. W. Manning whose 1926 burial ceremony included a cross of red roses--a gift of the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.

In Why Texans Fought in the Civil War, Charles David Grear provides insights into what motivated Texans to fight for the Confederacy. Mining important primary sources—including thousands of letters and unpublished journals—he affords readers the opportunity to hear, often in the combatants’ own words, why it was so important to them to engage in tumultuous struggles occurring so far from home. As Grear notes, in the decade prior to the Civil War the population of Texas had tripled. The state was increasingly populated by immigrants from all parts of the South and foreign countries. When the war began, it was not just Texas that many of these soldiers enlisted to protect, but also their native states, where they had family ties.

Given in memory of Edward and Billie Madeley.

The Civil War hardly scratched the Confederate state of Texas. Thousands of Texans died on battlefields hundreds of miles to the east, of course, but the war did not destroy Texas's farms or plantations or her few miles of railroads. Although unchallenged from without, Confederate Texans faced challenges from within—from fellow Texans who opposed their cause. Dissension sprang from a multitude of seeds. It emerged from prewar political and ethnic differences; it surfaced after wartime hardships and potential danger wore down the resistance of less-than-enthusiastic rebels; it flourished, as some reaped huge profits from the bizarre war economy of Texas. Texas Divided is neither the history of the Civil War in Texas, nor of secession or Reconstruction. Rather, it is the history of men dealing with the sometimes fragmented southern society in which they lived—some fighting to change it, others to preserve it—and an examination of the lines that divided Texas and Texans during the sectional conflict of the nineteenth century.