This investigation resulted from a pilot research paper prepared in conjunction with a graduate course on the Civil War. This study suggested that the Federal blockade of the Confederacy may not have contributed significantly to its defeat. Traditionally, historians had assumed that the Union's Anaconda Plan had effectively strangled the Confederacy. Recent studies which compared the statistics of ships captured to successful infractions of the blockade had somewhat revised these views. While accepting these revisionist findings as broadly valid, this investigation strove to determine specifically the effectiveness of Admiral Farragut's West Gulf Blockading Squadron. Since the British Foreign Office maintained consulates in three blockaded southern ports and in many Caribbean ports through which blockade running was conducted, these consular records were vital for this study. Personal research in Great Britain's Public Record Office disclosed valuable consular reports pertaining to the effectiveness of the Federal blockade. American consular records, found in the National Archives in Washington, D.C. provided excellent comparative reports from those same Gulf ports. Official Confederate reports, contained in the National Archives, various state archives and in the published Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies revealed valuable statistical data on foreign imports. Limited use was made of …

This study examines neglected aspects of the educational history of Texas. Although much emphasis has been placed on the western, frontier aspects of the state in the years after Appomattox, this study assumes that Texas remained primarily a southern state until 1900, and its economic, political, social, and educational development followed the patterns of the other ex-Confederate states as outlined by C. Vann Woodward in his Origins of the New South. This study of the educational history of Texas should aid in understanding such developments for the South as a whole. For the purposes of this study, "education" is defined in terms of institutions specifically created for the formal education of the young. Additionally, the terms "public education" and "private education" are used extensively. It is a contention of this study that the obvious differences between public and private schools in the last half of the twentieth century were not so obvious in the last half of the nineteenth, at least in Texas. Finally, an attempt has been made to confine the study to those areas of formal schooling which are today commonly called primary and secondary, although this was difficult because of the lack of definition used in naming …