General Sterling Price and the Civil War in the West (review)

BOOK REVIEWS77 Rio Grande and immediately thereafter to the defeated Union commander to evacuate his troops. Professor Baughman gives a straightforward and readable history of Morgan's business operations, based on ample manuscript sources and embellished with a few weU-chosen headnote quotations ranging from Aristides the Just to Dun & Bradstreet . His analysis throws much light on what he calls "business in history" but considerably less on the economics of southern development. The author contrasts Morgan's activities before and after the CivU War in terms of the distinction between the more "opportunistic" and the more "developmental" ends of "the investment spectrum." The former type of investment expects quick returns by exploiting existing opportunities whüe the latter requires a longer-term commitment of funds and is likely to require a closer relationship with government. According to this analysis, Morgan's antebeUum career, mainly devoted to shipping, was closer to the opportunistic end of the spectrum, though profiting from the domestic monopoly of the coasting trade and federal mail subsidies. On the other hand, Morgan's postbellum career, with its greater emphasis on railroads, brought him nearer to the developmental end. Railroad construction required heavier initial investment and returns depended on the buUding up of the country. In this period, moreover, there was "an increased, more fluid, and more uncertain inter-relationship with government," including both the danger of oppressive taxation and the promise of generous assistance. Morgan was not always either happy or successful in "his role, for his unprecedented, as applicant for, and recipient of, public aid." Yet he managed to end his career in full control of "a network of raUroads and steamships interlocking the Gulf Southwest with the eastern United States and northern Latin America." The book's greatest interest lies in its analysis of Morgan's methods of organization and their relation to changes in American business. He began operations in a period of individual entrepreneurs, often colorful and occasionaUy piratical. In the 1850's, "in one of the most ruthless episodes in American financial history," he managed to squeeze Cornelius Vanderbüt out of the Nicaragua transit line and, in spite of the Commodore's threats, survived to compete and cooperate with him on later occasions. Morgan's methods remained highly personal throughout his six decades of business life. The associates to whom he devolved the most authority were a son and three weU-chosen sons-in-law. He preferred self-insurance for his vessels, though the risks to the owner—not to mention the crews—are suggested by an appendix table which shows that, out of one hundred Morgan steamships, twentythree were sunk and sixteen seized by the Confederacy. Even the device of incorporation was used sparingly and never to permit substantial shareholding by outsiders . The books of Morgan's Texas and Louisiana Railroad Company in the 1870's had no place for a profit-and-loss account; aU gains were paid directly to Morgan himself. Just before his death at the age of eighty-three, when his assets were finaUy put together in a single company, he himself subscribed to aU but sixty of the fifty thousand shares. Yet within a few years this independent Morgan empire was completely taken over by a greater and more impersonal, and by this time more characteristic, corporation, the Southern Pacific Railroad. Carter Goodrich University of Pittsburgh General Sterling Price and the Civil War in the West. By Albert Castel. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968. Pp. xiii, 300. $8.95.) With the exception of the Joseph Parks' biography of Edmund Kirby Smith and Ludwell Johnson's exceUent analysis of the Red River campaign, little high-quahty scholarship has dealt with the Trans-Mississippi West during the Civil War. Now 78CIVIL WAR HISTORY Albert Castel has contributed to this field of literature. Castel clearly delineates both his reasons for writing the book and his goals. He considers Price an interesting figure and a central character in the Trans-Mississippi area and feels this enough to justify his study. Making no pretense to writing a biography , he intends instead to present a narrative of the activities of Price as they relate to the Civil War in...