The innumerable dots the author deftly connects take the story far beyond Texas. Kennedy begins with a detailed chronicle of the commerce linking British and French textile mills and merchants with Southern cotton plantations. When the cotton states seceded from the Union, they overestimated British and French dependence on Southern cotton. As a result, the Southern plantocracy believed that the British would continue supporting the use of slaves in order to sustain the supply of cotton—a miscalculation with dire consequences for the Confederacy.
As cartographers and surveyors located boundaries specified in new international treaties and alliances, they violated earlier agreements with Indian tribes. The Indians were to be displaced yet again, now from Texas cotton lands. The plantation system was thus a prime mover behind Indian removal, Kennedy shows, and it yielded power and riches for planters, bankers, merchants, millers, land speculators, Indian-fighting generals and politicians, and slave traders.
In Texas, at the plantation system’s farthest geographic reach, cotton scored its last triumphs. No one who seeks to understand the complex history of Texas can overlook this book.
Roger G. Kennedy (1926–2011) served as Director of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History and then of the National Park Service. He authored numerous articles and books, including Burr, Hamilton, and Jefferson: A Study in Character and Mr. Jefferson’s Lost Cause: Land, Farmers, Slavery, and the Louisiana Purchase.
William deBuys is an award-winning author of seven books, including A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest.