The Fate of Texas: The Civil War and the Lone Star State

4. The Price of Liberty: The Great Hanging at Gainesville

4 The Price of Liberty The Great Hanging at Gainesville Richard B. McCaslin The deadliest lynching in U.S. history occurred in Texas during the Civil War. Militia mustered under Confederate authority in Cooke County arrested more than 150 men in October 1862. Vigilantes in Gainesville, the county seat, hanged 40 men. A few more were executed in other counties, but Gainesville became most closely linked to the “Great Hanging.” The news traveled widely, but hopes for justice were stymied by wartime endorsement of the event by state officials and postwar efforts by national and local leaders for reconciliation. Ironically, a concern for order and security motivated participants on both sides, frustrating many who sought redress afterward.1 Cooke County lies in the watersheds of the Trinity and Red rivers in North Texas. Early settlement proceeded slowly, and like much of the antebellum frontier , the region was plagued with vigilantism. Settler David J. Eddleman recalled that a “rope and some convenient tree” were often used “to dispatch business.”2 It was not until 1849, a year after Cooke County was created, that commissioners asked Daniel Montague to locate a seat for the government. Controversy 53 postponed a decision until August 1850, when locals acted to end the debate. A referendum was scheduled, but while some were visiting a tract, Chief Justice Robert Wheelock waved a jug of whisky and asked all who wanted the seat on the Elm Fork to follow him. Most did, and the commissioners accepted their choice. Several had served under Gen. Edmund P. Gaines against the Seminoles, so the town became Gainesville, though it was not incorporated as such until 1873. The establishment of the Butterfield Overland Mail route transformed Gainesville. The stagecoaches entered Texas across the Red River, then stopped in Sherman and Diamond’s Station in Grayson County before rolling to Gainesville . Settlers followed in droves. The population of Cooke County in 1850 was 220; by 1860 it was 3,760. An army officer in 1854 found Gainesville to be a “collection of five or six log cabins, dignified with the name of a town.” In 1859 a visitor saw fifty or sixty houses, “most of them neat edifices and none shabby.” The census in 1860 listed 280 people in the town, which the Texas Almanac asserted was “perhaps one of the most pleasant . . . in North Texas.”3 The flood of immigrants created deep divisions that mirrored those in the state as a whole. By 1860, nonslaveowners from the Upper South remained a majority, as they had been from the start, but a slaveowner minority, mostly from the Lower South, occupied the best lands and dominated the local economy. Nonslaveowners settled in the Eastern Cross Timbers on the line between Cooke and Grayson counties. Those in the southeastern corner of Cooke County, known as “sandlappers,” built a school and church on land donated by Rama Dye. Montague and other slaveowners resided on Fish Creek, which flowed into the Red River. More slaveowners clustered on the river at Sivell’s Bend and Delaware Bend, where James G. Bourland, a former state senator, built his home. As elsewhere, economic prominence became political dominance for Cooke County slaveowners. In 1861 the chief justice, sheriff, and three of the four county commissioners owned slaves. Local slaveholders also led volunteers against Indians. Bourland added to his two decades of service by commanding a company of volunteers in 1858, and his brother did the same in Grayson County. Their targets were not always Indians, though. Four whites accused of raids in Jack County, carved from Cooke County in 1856, were acquitted by a court but hanged by vigilantes. Bourland’s brother killed two slaves in an uprising allegedly inspired by abolitionists. Also, his son-in-law, slaveholder Samuel C. Doss, chaired a Gainesville vigilante meeting that exiled an accused abolitionist. Unfortunately for those concerned with order and security, more abolitionists came, including some ministers of the Northern Methodist Episcopal Church who continued to work in areas claimed by southern preachers. Unrest in Kansas and John Brown’s raid in 1859 increased tensions. Tempers flared 54 Richard B. McCaslin when fires erupted in the summer of 1860, damaging Dallas, Denton, Pilot Point, and Gainesville. Some insisted that high temperatures had ignited newly introduced phosphorous matches in local stores, but many believed abolitionists started the fires. John Marshall of Austin’s Texas State Gazette printed a note from Charles R...