Chapter 6 narrates the 2nd Texas’ post Shiloh service record, including the bloody battle of Corinth in October 1862, which resulted in the martyred death of Colonel Rogers. Although there were questions surrounding his death, a celebratory tale of him took shape, portraying him as a martyr for the Confederate cause. After Corinth, the 2nd Texas had transformed into an elite fighting unit, but the stigma of Shiloh seemed to linger. The chapter closes with their final days in Galveston, depleted and demoralized.

Chapter 6 narrates the 2nd Texas’ post Shiloh service record, including the bloody battle of Corinth in October 1862, which resulted in the martyred death of Colonel Rogers. Although there were questions surrounding his death, a celebratory tale of him took shape, portraying him as a martyr for the Confederate cause. After Corinth, the 2nd Texas had transformed into an elite fighting unit, but the stigma of Shiloh seemed to linger. The chapter closes with their final days in Galveston, depleted and demoralized.

Emancipation Proclamation also provides for black military enlistment, and a significant percentage of black Union troops eventually come from the lower Mississippi valley. Proclamation also raises issue of how emancipation will factor into restoring rebellious states, and debate begins in Congress and northern society over securing free-state restoration. Unionist movements in Louisiana and Tennessee begin to divide into “free-state” and “conservative” factions. Free-state Unionists are committed to restoring rebellious states without slavery, though opposing black political and legal equality. Conservative Unionists develop argument for restoring states to the Union while maintaining slavery. Republicans formulate Reconstruction policy around the Constitution’s “republican form of government” in requiring the rebellious states to abolish slavery.

The success of the Federal military campaigns at Vicksburg and Port Hudson (Louisiana) give the Union control of the entire Mississippi River and alter the course of the war. The campaigns also bring about the first substantive combat experience of black soldiers in the war. Tennessee Unionists hold a convention in July 1863 that precipitates the split between free-state and conservative Unionists. In Louisiana, conservative Unionists petition Lincoln to recognize their efforts to organize a loyal, proslavery government, but Lincoln rejects the proposal. Free-state Unionists in Louisiana also develop plans for restoring the state predicated on abolishing slavery.

William H. Williams was also intimately connected with a wildcat bank on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, the Commercial Bank of Millington. Slave traders such as Williams and Thomas N. Davis helped underwrite the state–chartered banks that proliferated after the death of the Second Bank of the United States, supplying a portion of the start–up capital required for them to go into operation. In turn, many of these very same banks kept slave traders awash in the paper money necessary for slave dealers to pay for their human commodities in the cash that sellers wanted. Williams was sued by at least three different plaintiffs who alleged that he paid for slaves with paper money from the dying Millington bank, knowing that those notes would soon be worthless.

The Middle Miocene marked the emergence of the Appalachian uplands as a significant sediment source to the Gulf of Mexico. As a result, the Tennessee River joined the Mississippi in creating the dominant fluvial–deltaic depocenter. At the same time, supply from Western Interior uplands decreased. Two Miocene deposodes and multiple eustatically modulated high-frequency Pliocene–Pleistocene deposodes are recorded in northern Gulf stratigraphy. The continental slope wedge prograded onto the shallow Sigsbee salt, initiating canopy deformation and rapid basinward canopy advance. Salt-encased minibasins created rugose slope topography with multiple, efficient sediment traps. Nonetheless, large volumes of sediment bypassed the continental slope and constructed a series of large, long-lived abyssal plain fans. A narrow coastal plain and shelf prograded along the western Gulf margin. Extensional growth faulting was compensated basinward by compressional faulting and folding above Paleogene detachments. In the Sureste, the river-fed, prograding continental margin and ongoing basement deformation mobilized salt of the Campeche salt basin.