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Historical person
1812–1883
Elisha M. Pease was a lawyer and politician who took part in the Texas Revolution and later served two terms as governor of Texas from 1853 to 1857. A Unionist during the secession crisis, he opposed Texas joining the Confederacy. During Reconstruction, military authorities appointed him governor in 1867, but he resigned after conflict over policy and the limits of civilian authority. He supported public education and a stronger, more accountable state government.
Pease is not the subject of a widely known historical novel, although he belongs to the political background of fiction about the Republic of Texas, the Civil War and Reconstruction. His career offers a perspective often missing from heroic frontier narratives: a prominent Texan who rejected secession and later worked within Reconstruction government. Fictional treatments could use his life to explore divided loyalties and the contested rebuilding of state institutions.
Larry McMurtry’s Comanche Moon places Elisha M. Pease within a narrative shaped by family, marriage and personal loyalty and court politics and dynastic power.
Series
The Lonesome Dove quartet follows Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call from their first service as young Texas Rangers to old age at the closing of the nineteenth-century frontier. Dead Man’s Walk and Comanche Moon trace their early experiences during the Republic of Texas, the Santa Fe expedition and…
All books in this series
