The Democratic Party held a lynching in Texas 161 years ago in 1862. It was less than 20 years later my great grandfather was born in McCullough County and who died after I was born in 1952. My great grandmother was born in 1880 and died when I was 16 years old. It seems like a long time ago until you begin to weave the historical threads together. Ancient history…not so much.
They were white men opposed to Secession, to the Civil War, to conscription into the Confederate Army. It was an illegal organized crime, a horrific mob justice homicide. It was only one criminal horror of many conducted against free men of the recent Republic of Texas who had come there to escape the totalitarian rulers of other places in the world.
God Bless their souls.
The Democratic Party never really changes – only the strategy and tactics. It is, indeed, the largest organized crime syndicate in American history.
Forty suspected Unionists in Confederate Texas were hanged at Gainesville in October 1862. Two others were shot as they tried to escape. Although the affair reached its climax in Cooke County, men were killed in neighboring Grayson, Wise, and Denton counties. Most were accused of treason or insurrection, but evidently few had actually conspired against the Confederacy, and many were innocent of the abolitionist sentiments for which they were tried.
The Great Hanging was the result of several years of building tension. The completion of the Butterfield Overland Mail route from St. Louis through Gainesville brought many new people from the upper South and Midwest into Cooke County. By 1860 fewer than 10 percent of the heads of households owned slaves. The slaveholders increasingly feared the influence of Kansas abolitionists in every unrest. In the summer of 1860 several slaves and a northern Methodist minister were lynched in North Texas. Cooke and the surrounding counties voted against secession and thus focused the fears of planters on the nonslaveholders in the region. Rumors of Unionist alliances with Kansas Jayhawkers and Indians along the Red River, together with the petition of E. Junius Foster, editor of the Sherman Patriot, to separate North Texas as a new free state, brought emotions to a fever pitch.
Historical Note: Less than 10% of Texans before the Civil War ever owned a slave.
Importantly, during the most violent period in American history of 1865 to 1900, historians have researched and compiled the records of lynchings across Texas of black and white victims and found at least 25% of them were at least white defenders of black citizens or anti-slavery activists.
The Nueces Massacre is another story for another day.
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