From 1847 to 1891, Guy Morrison Bryan was a prominent Texas politician who influenced many of the policies and events that shaped the state. Raised in his Uncle Stephen F. Austin's shadow, he was a Texas nationalist who felt responsible for promoting the interests of his state, its earliest settlers, and his family. During his nineteen years in the Texas Legislature and two years in the United States House of Representatives, he safeguarded land grants, supported internal improvements and education, and challenged northern hostility towards slavery. Convinced that abolitionists would stop at nothing to destroy the institution and Texas, he led his state's walkout of the National Democratic Convention in 1860 and became a leading proponet of secession. During the Civil War, he served as a staff officer, and his ability to mediate conflicts between local and national leaders propped up the isolated Confederate Trans-Mississippi Department. Finally as Speaker of the House, he helped oust Governor Edmund J. Davis in 1874 and "redeem" the state from Republican rule before convincing President Rutherford B. Hayes to adopt a conciliatory policy towards Texas and the South. Despite the tremendous influence Bryan wielded, scholars have largely ignored his contributions. This dissertation establishes his significance, uses his willingness to transfer national allegiances to consider nationalism--whether Texan, American, or Confederate--in the United States-Mexico Borderlands, and sheds light on neglected subjects like the role of staff officers in the Civil War.

For the past century and a half historians have conducted more research on the Civil War and Reconstruction than most other subjects. Except for minor mentions and one biography on the governor, the Restored Government of Virginia has been left out of the historiography. The earliest historians or political commentators believed the Restored Government to be a small and ineffectual government that failed to achieve any broad level of support from its constituents. Furthermore, the early works suggested that the governments’ true purpose was to see that western Virginia was separated from Virginia, not to seek the return of Virginia to the Union. While there has been slight variation over the years, historians generally continue to accept this narrative. Through the use of both federal documents and the Restored Governments various publications, this thesis seeks to demonstrate the legality behind the governments’ formation as well as explain how and why the government went from successfully restoring Virginia to being relegated to the dustbin of history. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2019. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

This dissertation is the first comprehensive study of “everyday” racial violence in the postbellum South. Taking as its focus the states of Louisiana and Kentucky, One Dead Freedman juxtaposes the practical enactment of black citizenship against daily racial terrorism by incorporating personal, familial, and community testimony left behind by African Americans who had a direct experience with such violence. Within this dissertation, the terminology of “everyday violence” is employed to differentiate the more mundane forms of white violence from the more spectacular forms of Reconstruction-era violence such as lynching, the Ku Klux Klan, and race riots. Thus, the definition of everyday violence includes anything from verbal threats all the way to the brutal beatings, whippings, and murders that were so commonplace as to not draw attention from the local and national media. One Dead Freedman is organized both thematically and chronologically, and it examines everyday racial violence in five distinct “spaces”: military enlistment; the workplace; the household; schools; and voting stations. This dissertation pays close attention to what each of these spaces meant to black Southerners during the first years of emancipation, and, then, digs into what forms, or types, of violence were utilized by white Southerners in each. One Dead Freedman concludes that white Southerners used racial violence in an effort to circumscribe the practical enactment of black citizenship on a daily basis during Reconstruction. This violence was, ironically, both pervasive and diffuse, and served to undercut the position of African Americans in the South, and America at large, far beyond 1877 by limiting black mobility and autonomy in both private and public spaces in which African Americans defined the meaning of their own freedom. The persistence of this violence, and its legacy, was central to the enduring power of racism in America through the Civil Rights Movement and even into modern America.