In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Epilogue CONCLUSIONS OF A MAD PEOPLE On a July weekend in 98 some two hundred descendants of Cato Miller, one of the three blacks hanged for allegedly setting the Dallas fire of 860, met to commemorate the 2st anniversary of their ancestor’s death. The object, according to the organizer of the meeting, was to keep alive awareness of the event and make sure future generations of the family would not forget.1 It was not just Cato Miller’s descendants who needed reminding. Few Dallasites knew of the dramatic fire that led to the great panic of 860, which set the stage for the secession of Texas, as well as six other states of the Lower South. In the late 980s, in an effort to make the community more aware of the story, a group of Dallas citizens organized a “Committee for the Dallas Fire of 860.” The alleged incendiary plot and the hanging of the three blacks “has been talked about in a whisper,” said one member of the multi-racial committee, and the group intended to see that the episode received the attention it deserved. Another committee member, a professor at Southern Methodist University, said: “We want to remember the deaths of these persons who were involved in the struggle for justice and the revolutionary spirit of the 860s.”2 In conjunction with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the committee was able to secure passage by the Dallas City Council of a resolution recognizing that “Dallas was burned in an alleged ‘slave uprising’” and noting the hanging of the three slaves “for their alleged part in setting fire to the city.” The committee was less successful in its effort to place a state historical marker at the location of the hangings. The marker chairwoman reportedly thought such a . Dallas Times Herald, July 2, 98. 2. Ibid., February 3, 988. 97 98 texas terror commemoration might have a provocative effect upon the local citizenry and rejected the committee’s application, which she considered “inflammatory.”3 The prevailing public ignorance of the Dallas fire and its tragic repercussions probably stemmed from the failure of most Texas historians to deal with it. It may have been the “provocative” potential of the Texas Troubles that led many early historians of the period simply to leave the story out of their histories of the state.4 Even those who wrote specifically about Dallas’s past gave short shrift to the issue. For example, in his history of Dallas County, John H. Cochran said only that the fire destroyed Dallas and was “believed at the time to have been of incendiary origin.” Philip Lindsley in his history of Dallas mentioned “the great fire of July 8, 860,” but he said nothing about its causes or an alleged abolitionist conspiracy.5 The fact is, the Texas slave panic of 860 has posed problems for most of the historians who have dealt with it. In large measure this has been due to the adamant insistence of contemporary southern rights papers and politicians that there was indeed an abolitionist conspiracy and the equally strong-willed denials by their unionist opponents. An abundance of evidence and testimony on both sides of the argument has made it difficult for scholars to distinguish truth from fiction on the question of whether there actually was a plot. Perhaps it was for this reason that the most prominent national and southern historians who wrote about the Civil War era in the early to mid-twentieth century did not even mention the Texas slave insurrection panic.6 Of all the early scholars 3. Karen Ray, “The Untold Story,” Dallas Life Magazine, Dallas Morning News, July 8, 990, 8–5. 4. For example, see Dudley G. Wooten, A Complete History of Texas for Schools, Colleges and General Use (Dallas, 899); Louis J. Wortham, A History of Texas, from Wilderness to Commonwealth , 5 vols. (Fort Worth, Tex., 924); Clarence Wharton, History of Texas (Dallas, 935); Lewis W. Newton and Herbert P. Gambrell, A Social and Political History of Texas (Dallas, 932); Frank X. Tolbert, An Informal History of Texas, from Cabeza de Vaca to Temple Houston (New York, 96); Ralph W. Steen, History of Texas (Austin, 939). 5. John H. Cochran, Dallas County: A Record of Its Pioneers and Progress (Dallas, 928), 3; Philip Lindsley, A History of Greater Dallas and Vicinity, 2 vols. (Chicago, 909). See also Frank M. Cockrell, History of Early Dallas (Chicago, 944...

Share