Records Of The Confederate States Quartermaster Trans Mississippi Depot At Houston Harris County Texas 1 Feb 1865 To 22 May 1865

Today’s Greater Houston is a vast urban place. In the mid-nineteenth century, however, Houston was a small town – a dot in a vast frontier. Extant written histories of Houston largely confine themselves to the small area within the city limits of the day, leaving nearly forgotten the history of large rural areas that later fell beneath the city’s late twentieth century urban sprawl. One such area is that of upper Buffalo Bayou, extending westward from downtown Houston to Katy. European settlement here began at Piney Point in 1824, over a decade before Houston was founded. Ox wagons full of cotton traveled across a seemingly endless tallgrass prairie from the Brazos River east to Harrisburg (and later to Houston) along the San Felipe Trail, built in 1830. Also here, Texan families fled eastward during the Runaway Scrape of 1836, immigrant German settlers trekked westward to new farms along the north bank of the bayou in the 1840s, and newly freed African American families walked east toward Houston from Brazos plantations after Emancipation. Pioneer settlers operated farms, ranches and sawmills. Near present-day Shepherd Drive, Reconstruction-era cowboys assembled herds of longhorns and headed north along a southeastern branch of the Chisholm Trail. Little physical evidence remains today of this former frontier world.

The Civil War changed the United States in many ways—economic, political, and social. Of these changes, none was more important than Emancipation. Besides freeing nearly four million slaves, it brought agricultural wage labor to a reluctant South and gave a vote to black adult males in the former slave states. It also offered former slaves new opportunities in education, property ownership—and military service. From late 1862 to the spring of 1865, as the Civil War raged on, the federal government accepted more than 180,000 black men as soldiers, something it had never done before on such a scale. Known collectively as the United States Colored Troops and organized in segregated regiments led by white officers, some of these soldiers guarded army posts along major rivers; others fought Confederate raiders to protect Union supply trains, and still others took part in major operations like the Siege of Petersburg and the Battle of Nashville. After the war, many of the black regiments took up posts in the former Confederacy to enforce federal Reconstruction policy. Freedom by the Sword tells the story of these soldiers' recruitment, organization, and service. Thanks to its broad focus on every theater of the war and its concentration on what black soldiers actually contributed to Union victory, this volume stands alone among histories of the U.S. Colored Troops.

Getting the Message Through, the companion volume to Rebecca Robbins Raines' Signal Corps, traces the evolution of the corps from the appointment of the first signal officer on the eve of the Civil War, through its stages of growth and change, to its service in Operation DESERT SHIELD/DESERT STORM. Raines highlights not only the increasingly specialized nature of warfare and the rise of sophisticated communications technology, but also such diverse missions as weather reporting and military aviation. Information dominance in the form of superior communications is considered to be sine qua non to modern warfare. As Raines ably shows, the Signal Corps--once considered by some Army officers to be of little or no military value--and the communications it provides have become integral to all aspects of military operations on modern digitized battlefields. The volume is an invaluable reference source for anyone interested in the institutional history of the branch.