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Comment: The Texas Bar In The Nineteenth Century, Mary K. Bonsteel Tachau

Vanderbilt Law Review

Maxwell H. Bloomfield's Article, "The Texas Bar in the Nineteenth Century," presents an ingenious collage of information derived from more or less standard kinds of secondary works, interspersed with excerpts from the diary of a Texas lawyer and the brotherly correspondence of another, and highlighted with statistical data from the manuscript censuses of 1850, 1860, and 1900.Although the evidence centers on Galveston, the careers of William Pitt Ballinger and Alfred Howell, and the Texas Bar Association movement, Professor Bloomfield's skill in creating a series of vignettes leaves us with impressions of the entire bar for fifty years of what was …