Trouble, Trials, and Vexations: The Journal and Correspondence of Rachel Perry Moores, Texas Plantation Mistress

Rachel Moores and her husband David operated a cotton plantation in the bottoms of the Sulphur River in North East Texas. From that vantage point, they viewed the changing fortunes of Texas as the American Civil War opened their privileged lifestyle. David went to war while the task of operating this large farming enterprise fell to Rachel. More than 2000 acres and dozens of enslaved people fell to her to manage.

This dairy chronicles her struggles and provides a priceless voice of a woman having to adapt and overcome the adversities of that violent age. Female perspectives often get overlooked when discussing the American Civil War and the effects of distant events often had catastrophic implications on the folks back home. Rachel's Moores diary provides a priceless window into the changing realities of Texans who once bet their futures on the value of cotton.

This diary and journal will be an important addition to the scholarship about elite white women and their lives in the antebellum south. This manuscript is unique in that is is an extensive and detailed look into the life of a woman of the slave-owning class in frontier Texas, offering not only her vivid view of the slave system but of the daily life of a plantation mistress and of an invalid seeking a cure for her disease from New Orleans to New York.

THOMAS W. CUTRER earned his B.A. in history at the Louisiana State University in 1969 and, after three years' service as an intelligence officer in the United States Air Force, returned to LSU for a master's degree in English literature, which he completed in 1974. In 1980 he was awarded the Ph.D. in the American Civilization Program at the University of Texas. Doctor Cutrer then spent a decade in public history, first as curator of history at the University of Texas Institute of Texan Cultures in San Antonio, and then as associate director of the University of Texas Center for Studies in Texas History and managing editor of the Handbook of Texas at the Texas State Historical Association. His scholarly work focuses on the cultural history of the American South and Nineteenth Century U.S. military history, especially the American Civil War.