DONALD S. FRAZIER is professor of history at McMurry University in Abilene, Texas, and author of Blood and Treasure: Confederate Empire in the Southwest, published by Texas A&M University Press. His other works include Cottonclads: The Battle of Galveston and the Defense of the Texas Coast, an edited work; The U.S. and Mexico at War: Nineteenth Century Expansionism and Conflict, and Frontier Texas: History of a Borderland 1780-1880 and The Texas You Expect: The Story of the Buffalo Gap Historic Village, works he co-authored.
|DONALD S. FRAZIER is assistant professor of history at McMurry University in Abilene, Texas, and author of numerous articles on Texas, Civil War, and borderlands history. His cartographic work has been published in many books on Southern history.""Frazier's thoroughly researched study provides the best account to date of Confederate attempts to conquer and govern the American Southwest during the Civil War. He shows that this theater, ignored in many of the standard accounts of the Civil War, had far more significance than the relatively small number of soldiers engaged in its campaigns would indicate. Frazier demonstrates that Confederate western initiatives, which included Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, California, and northern Mexico, derived from prewar Texan and Southern slavery expansion. His conclusion that Jefferson Davis might have provided the Confederacy with its best chance for independence had he committed more resources to the West, will fuel the debate over Davis's strategic competency.