Higher Education on the Texas Blackland Prairie: Trinity University's Civil War Era.

UNIVERSITIES & colleges; PUBLIC institutions; AMERICAN Civil War, 1861-1865; HIGHER education; SLAVERY

The article provides a model for other southern colleges and universities founded during the Civil War era to clarify how they, too, benefited from the slave economy. It describes how Trinity University's founders were able to accomplish their institution's unlikely survival and enrich their own positions by creating a valuable new educational commodity. It also explores the historiography of nineteenth-century higher education.