This study examines the impact of the citizens of the La Reunion colony on the development of Dallas and Dallas County. The French, Belgian, and Swiss families that formed the utopian colony broughta blend of European culture and education to the Texas frontier in 1853. The founding of La Reunion and a record of its short existence is covered briefly in the first two chapters. The major part of the research, however, deals with the colonists who remained in Dallas County after the colony failed in 1856. Chapters three and four make use of city, county, and state records along with personal collections from the Dallas Historical Society Archives and the Dallas Public Library to examine the colonists effect on the government and business community. Chapter five explores the cultural development of the area through city and county records and personal collections.

Castilian law developed during the Reconquest of Spain. Women received certain legal rights to persuade them to move to the villages on the expanding frontier. These legal rights were codified in Las Siete Partidas, the monumental work of Castilian law, compiled in the thirteenth century. Under Queen Isabella, Castilian law became the law of all Spain. As Spain discovered, explored, and colonized the New World, Castilian law spread. The Recopilacidn de Los Leyes de Las Indias complied the laws for all the colonies. Texas, as the last area in North America settled by Spain, retained Castilian law. Case law from the Bexar Archives proves this for the Villa of San Fernando(present-day San Antonio). Castilian laws and customs persisted even on the Texas frontier.

The Walling Family of Nineteenth-Century Texas recounts the actions of the first four generations of the John Walling family. Through a heavily quantitative study, the study focuses on the patterns of movement, service, and seizing opportunity demonstrated by the family as they took full advantage of the benefits of frontier expansion in the Old South and particularly Texas. In doing so, it chronicles the role of a relatively unknown family in many of the most defining events of the nineteenth-century Texas experience such as the Texas Revolution, Mexican War, Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Close of the Frontier. Based on extensive research in census, tax, election, land, military, family paper, newspaper, and existing genealogical records; the study documents the contributions of family members to the settlement of more than forty counties while, at the same time, noting its less positive behaviors such as its open hostility to American Indians, and significant slave ownership. This study seeks to extend the work of other quantitative studies that looked at movement and political influence in the Old South, Texas, and specific communities to the microcosm of a single extended family. As a result, it should be of use to those wanting a greater …

During the mid-nineteenth century, the citizens of Texas were forced to keep their mentally disturbed family members at home which caused stress on the caregivers and the further debilitation of the afflicted. To remedy this situation, mental health experts and Texas politicians began to create a system of healing known as state asylums. The purpose of this study is to determine how Texas mental health care came into being, the research and theories behind the prevention and treatment programs that asylum physicians employed to overcome mental illness, in addition to the victories and shortcomings of the system. Through this work, it will be shown that during the 1850s until the 1920s institutions faced difficulty in achieving success from many adverse conditions including, but not limited to, overcrowding, large geographical conditions, poor health practices, faulty construction, insufficient funding, ineffective prevention and treatment methods, disorganization, cases of patient abuse, incompetent employees, prejudice, and legal improprieties. As a result, by 1930, these asylums were merely places to detain the mentally ill in order to rid them from society. This thesis will also confirm that while both Texas politicians and mental health experts desired to address and overcome mental illness in Texas, they were …

The effect of the Civil War and Reconstruction on the southern planter elite remains a topic of interest to historians. Did the war ruin the planter class? Or, did they maintain economic, geographic, or social persistence? This study focuses on the persistence from 1850 to 1880 of five East Texas large planter families who owned one hundred or more slaves in 1860. An analysis of data primarily from county, state, and federal records formthe basis of this study. Four families persisted as wealthy influential members of their postbellum communities. One family remained geographically persistent but not wealthy. The experiences of these families suggest that large East Texas planter families found it possible to persist in spite of the Civil War and Reconstruction.

This work is a study of white Texans' attitudes toward their role in the federal Union and their right to secede from it during the antebellum period. The central question of the study is why did people so strongly Unionist in 1846 became so strongly secessionist by 1861. In tracing this significant shift in Texans' sentiment, the author especially emphasizes the racial attitudes of white Texans, their emotional defense of the institution of slavery, and their strong conviction that the Negroes, if emancipated, would destroy white society. Of special importance to this study is the relationship of Texans' racial attitudes to their attitudes toward the Union.

The purpose of this monograph is to study the early Texas Republican party within the framework of well-known political party functions, i.e., to provide political leadership, recruit governmental personnel, generate public policy, and propagate ideology.

"This study deals primarily with the technical aspects of the cotton trade, examining the extent and nature of the trade, the activities of the state and Confederate governments to control cotton, and the specific problems of transportation. The concluding chapter, however, is devoted to the cotton economy in perspective, giving special attention to the financial aspects of buying and selling cotton and to the contribution of the cotton trade to Texas and the Trans-Mississippi Confederacy."--leaves iv-v.

The study challenges many traditional stereotypes of Texas during Reconstruction. Contrary to what Democrats charged, the Davis government did not levy exorbitant taxes. Radical taxes seemed high in comparison to antebellum taxes, because antebellum governments had financed operations with indemnity bonds, but they were not high in comparison to taxes in other states. Radical taxes constituted only 1.77 percent of the assessed value of property in Texas, which was lower than the average for the United States and about the same for other states undergoing Reconstruction. In Texas most of the tax increases during Reconstruction were made necessary by the Civil War and the increase in population. The tax increases paid for state and local governments, frontier and local protection, public buildings, internal improvements, and public schools. Edmund J. Davis, Radical governor, contributed significantly to Texas government when he attempted to focus attention on reforming the tax system,limiting state expenses to state income, limiting state aid for railroad companies, and protecting the public from railroad company abuses.

This thesis focuses upon the impact of war upon the progressive movement in Texas during 1914-1918. Chapter I defines progressivism in Texas and presents an overview of the political situation in the state as relating to the period. Chapter II discusses the negative impact that the first two years of World War I had upon the reform movement. Chapter III examines the revival of the Anti-Saloon League and the 1916 Democratic state convention. Chapter IV covers the war between James E. Ferguson and the University of Texas. Chapter V tells how the European war became a catalyst for the reform movement in Texas following America's entry, and its subsequent influence upon the election of 1918. Chapter VI concludes that James E. Ferguson's war with the University of Texas as well as World War I were responsible for the prohibitionist victory in the election of 1918.

Although the Council House Fight is well written about in the annals of early Texas history, this all-encompassing study will reveal a whole new picture. Unlike previous works that maintained one point of view, multiple perspectives were analyzed and explored to allow a more comprehensive view of the Council House Fight to emerge. Primary focus on social and cultural misunderstandings, as well as the mounting hostility between the Penateka Comanche and Texians across the frontier, will demonstrate their general distrust and hatred of the other. Detailing their complicated relationship will prove that neither the Texians nor the Comanche were without blame, and both shared responsibility for the deterioration of events on and before March 19, 1840.

This dissertation describes the various military outposts on the Texas frontier between 1866 and 1886. It is arranged geographically, with each chapter covering a major fort or geographical area and the smaller posts associated with it. Official military records and government reports serve as the primary sources of data. In 1866 when the United States Army returned to the defense of Texas after four years of civil war, the state's frontier lay open to depredations from several Indian tribes and from lawless elements in Mexico. The army responded to those attacks by establishing several lines of major forts to protect the various danger areas of the frontier. To extend its control and protection to remote, vulnerable, or strategically important points within its jurisdiction, each major fort established outposts. Two main categories of outposts existed in Texas, subposts and picket stations. Subposts served as permanent scouting camps or guarded strategic points or lines of communication. Picket stations protected outlying locations, such as stage stations, that were particularly vulnerable to attack. Because Indians raiding in Texas usually operated in fairly small groups, garrisons at outposts were similarly small. Company-sized detachments generally garrisoned subposts, and picket stations seldom held more than a dozen …

During the Progressive Era in the United States, social hygiene reformers underwent a fundamental change in their stance toward women accused of prostitution or promiscuous behavior. Rather than viewing such women as unfortunate victims of circumstance who were worthy of compassion, many Progressives deemed them as predatory villains who instead deserved incarceration, forced rehabilitation, and non-consenting medical interference. Texas, due to the many military bases within its borders, became a key battleground in this moral crusade against women as the carriers and proliferators of VD. "Promiscuous" women were seen as not only dangerous to the soldiers but also as a threat to the nation's security, creating an environment that led Texas Progressives to suppress women's civil liberties in the name of protecting soldiers. The catalyst for this change in attitude was World War I. The Great War brought to the forefront an unpleasant reality facing a significant percentage of America's fighting men: venereal disease. While combating sexually transmitted diseases was a serious medical and manpower concern for the military in the era before penicillin, the sole focus on women as the carriers and proliferators of VD led to a nationwide campaign against the "social evil" that demonized women and led …

This dissertation develops and utilizes a methodology for combining data drawn from the manuscript census returns and the county tax rolls to study landless farmers during the period from 1850 until 1880 in three Texas Brazos River Valley counties: Fort Bend, Milam, and Palo Pinto. It focuses in particular on those landless farmers who appear to have had no option other than tenant farming. It concludes that there were such landless farmers throughout the period, although they were a relatively insignificant factor in the agricultural economy before the Civil War. During the Antebellum decade, poor tenant farmers were a higher proportion of the population on the frontier than in the interior, but throughout the period, they were found in higher numbers in the central portion of the river valley. White tenants generally avoided the coastal plantation areas, although by 1880, that pattern seemed to be changing. Emancipation had tremendous impact on both black and white landless farmers. Although both groups were now theoretically competing for the same resource, productive crop land, their reactions during the first fifteen years were so different that it suggests two systems of tenant farming divided by caste. As population expansion put increasing pressure on the …

Forging Their Legacy: Cooperation and Accommodation in the Lower Rio Grande Valley is an examination of the relationships created during the mid-nineteenth century between Anglo and Tejano elites in the five counties that make up the Lower Rio Grande Valley. Conducted through a quantitative lens, the five-chapter study seeks to demonstrate that, although the period between 1848 and 1870 was fraught with conflict and violence, the Anglo and Tejano elite of the Lower Rio Grande Valley came together in cooperation in order not only to survive these troubling times but to prosper. The thesis begins by identifying and analyzing the economic and political elite in the Lower Rio Grande Valley during the 1850s. A new crop of Anglo immigrants arrived with the Mexican-American War, but only a small number willing to assimilate to local Tejano culture were able to leave their mark on the Lower Valley. Chapter 4 relates the effect of the Civil War on the elite of the Lower Valley. It explores the profitable cotton trade during the war and the struggle that both Anglo and Tejano elites faced during Reconstruction. The thesis concludes with a macro-analysis of the twenty-two-year period from 1848-1870. It summarizes overall trends found …

This paper discusses the influence of religious aspects in rural thought and how they played in the activities of agrarian movements and farm protest movements. The religious orientations of major agrarian reformers in Texas is discussed, as well as the similarities between Protestant religious institutions and agrarian institutions, specifically the Farmers' Alliance and People's Party of Texas.

"No adequate history of the activities of the Texas state government during the Civil War has been written. Instead this phase of state history has been treated only in a limited manner in general state and Civil War histories. A history of the state government's functions and role during this period is essential to understanding Texas' development as a state and its place in the Confederacy. This work is an attempt to provide such a history. A study of the internal political affairs of Texas during the war years, this work begins with the movement toward secession and ends with the collapse of the state government and the establishment of military rule in Texas. Emphasis has been placed on revealing how the state government attempted to cope with the numerous problems which the war engendered and the futility of these attempts." -- p.iii

I focus on Company A of the Nineteenth Texas Infantry, C.S.A., and its unique status among other Confederate military units. The raising of the company within the narrative of the regiment, its battles and campaigns, and the post-war experience of its men are the primary focal points of the thesis. In the first chapter, a systematic analysis of various aspects of the recruit’s background is given, highlighting the wealth of Company A’s officers and men. The following two chapters focus on the campaigns and battles experienced by the company and the praise bestowed on the men by brigade and divisional staff. The final chapter includes a postwar analysis of the survivors from Company A, concentrating on their locations, professions, and contributions to society, which again illustrate the achievements accomplished by the veterans of this unique Confederate unit. As a company largely drawn from Jefferson, Texas, a growing inland port community, Company A of the Nineteenth Texas Infantry differed from other companies in the regiment, and from most units raised across the Confederacy. Their unusual backgrounds, together with their experiences during and after the war, provide interesting perspectives on persistent questions concerning the motives and achievements of Texas Confederates.

This study concentrates on the social status of women in one southern town during the late nineteenth century and the Progressive Era.

The scope of this study is limited to Federal military occupation during the five years from 1865 to 1870. Only the interior counties, where a dense Negro population required the exercise of political and social responsibilities, will be considered in detail. A line from Wise through Bosque, Travis, Wilson, Karnes, and Goliad Counties to the coastal town of Corpus Christi would roughly separate interior from frontier posts.

Beauford Halbert Jester, thirty-sixth governor of Texas, had served nearly six months of his second term when he died on July 11, 1949. He tends to be remembered as the only Texas governor to die in office, but his accomplishments deserve greater recognition. Elected as the Establishment candidate in a bitter campaign against a liberal opponent, Jester had a surprisingly progressive administration. During his tenure the state generally expanded its services, began a prison reform program, reorganized the public school system, began an ambitious farm-to-market road program, attempted a new approach to juvenile delinquency, expanded educational opportunities for blacks, created a legislative redistricting board, and established a building fund for state-supported colleges and universities.

The aim of this thesis is to narrate and analyze lynching and atypical violence in Denton County, Texas, between 1920 and 1926. Through this intensive study of a rural county in north Texas, the role of law enforcement in typical and systemic violence is observed and the relationship between Denton County Officials and the Ku Klux Klan is analyzed. Chapter 1 discusses the root of the word lynching and submits a call for academic attention to violence that is unable to be categorized as lynching due to its restrictive definition. Chapter 2 chronicles known instances of lynching in Denton County from its founding through the 1920s including two lynchings perpetrated by Klavern 136, the Denton County Klan. Chapter 3 examines the relationship between Denton County Law Enforcement and the Klan. In Chapter 4, seasons of violence are identified and applied to available historical records. Chapter 5 concludes that non-lynching violence, termed "disappearances," occurred and argues on behalf of its inclusion within the historiography of Jim Crow Era criminal actions against Black Americans. In the Prologue and Epilogue, the development and dissolution of the St. John's Community in Pilot Point, Texas, is narrated.

This study examines the social and economic characteristics of the men who joined the Confederate Fourteenth Texas Infantry Regiment during the Civil War and provides a narrative history of the regiment's wartime service. The men of the Fourteenth Infantry enlisted in 1862 and helped to turn back the Federal Red River Campaign in April 1864. In creating a portrait of these men, the author used traditional historical sources (letters, diaries, medical records, secondary narratives) as well as statistical data from the 1860 United States census, military service records, and state tax rolls. The thesis places the heretofore unknown story of the Fourteenth Texas Infantry within the overall body of Civil War historiography.

Reacting to the Great Depression, Texans abandoned the philosophy of rugged individualism and turned to their state and federal governments for leadership. Texas's Governor Miriam Ferguson resultantly created the state's first relief agency, which administered all programs including those federally funded. Because the Roosevelt administration ordered state participation in and immediate implementation of the CCC, a multi-governmental, multi-departmental administrative alliance involving state and federal efforts resulted, which, because of scholars' preferences for research at the federal level, often is mistakenly described as a decentralized administration riddled with bureaucratic shortcomings. CCC operations within Texas, however, revealed that this complicated administrative structure embodied the reasons for the CCC's well-documented success.