Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide

by Tony Horwitz

Several Northern firms, including Brooks Brothers, thrived on “plantation clothing,” both fine suits for masters and cheaper wares used to dress up slaves for auction.

This landscape also made for toilsome travel, due to “frequent and embarrassing forks” in the road and “notions of distance we found incredibly vague.” The distance to one town, he was variously informed, was ninety-six miles, 120 miles, “a good long way,” or “thirty or forty miles, and damn’d long ones, too.”

In addition, Crockett and other new arrivals to Texas “were effectively illegal immigrants,” Winders said, since Mexico had barred further immigration from the US in 1830 and sought the expulsion of squatters.