Posted on 11/26/2005 9:36:29 PM PST by Mier
The fact is the lower South chose Disunion months before Lincoln was sworn into office, citing oppression and tyranny from the North as their reason. This after having won in Federal court [Dred Scott] and legislatively in Congress [Fugitive Slave Law].
I wonder how long the Dred Scott ruling would have survived if Lincoln had done what was threatened in the following article. Of course, by the time Lincoln got into power, reversing the Dred Scott decision was probably on the back burner.
The following is from the Austin State Gazette, November 17, 1860, reporting a speech by Stanton reported in the New York Tribune:
According to Mr. Stanton, the present organization of the Supreme Court is to be changed under Lincoln's administration, and New England, New York, and the Middle States, Missouri and the Northwest, and the Pacific coast are to have six or eight additional Judges.
"Then," says the Lincoln orator, "repudiating the novel and dangerous heresies of Taney and Catron, and returning to the faith of Jay and Marshall, it would embrace the earliest opportunity to entomb the political pronunciamento uttered in the Dred Scott case [loud cheers] and pile upon it an imperishable monument, inscribing thereon, as an appropriate epitaph, 'Died of the will of the American people!'
Those in the northern and central part of the state tended to be Scots-Irish from Tennesse and North Carolina. They had relatively few slaves and much of their part of Texas wasn't suited for cotton. Consequently, their concerns over secession reflected their minimal interest in slavery. That is perhaps reflected in the comments of Captain Baylor, the Indian fighter, whose comments about secession and the Union focused mainly on the failure of the Union to secure peace along the frontier. This frontier viewpoint also shows up in the Texas Ordinance of Secession.
The eastern and southeastern parts of Texas were settled by people from the lower South -- Georgia, Alabama. A number of them had slaves and were cotton farmers. Their attitude about secession focused on the protection of slavery. Here is an example of that attitude from a judge in the southeastern part of the state:
What Shall Be Done? Response of Judge P. W. Gray to the Meeting of the Citizens of Harris county [Texas] (Austin State Gazette, November 24, 1860, paragraphing mine for readability)
The now ascertained election of Abraham Lincoln to the Presidency, presents an alarming and dangerous issue for the consideration of the people of Texas, and of all the slave-holding States, irrespective of party.
It is not the mere election of the man that is dangerous, but it is the fact that he is the representative of a triumphant party, whose principles and aims are hostile to our institutions, and which, if carried out, must be fatal to them.
His election is the endorsement, by a dominant sectional majority, of the declaration of “irresistible conflict” between and Southern institutions. It is the approval of past violations of the Constitutional compact between the States, and the avowal to persist in the same course of aggression. It is denial of the equality of the States in the Union, a denunciation of their institutions, and a proclamation that all the powers and agencies of the federal Government will be exercised for the immediate restriction and ultimate extirpation of those institutions.
It is the triumph of the fanatical anti-slavery sentiment which has been increasing for years; and is now abolitionism arrayed against the rights and property of fifteen sovereign States, denouncing hostility and war, to be carried out under the aegis and forms of the Constitution, which itself guarantees them, and which was formed and based on principles of harmony and fraternity.
These considerations alarm, because involved in the election, and because the success of a party avowing such purposes must ultimately prove fatal to the peace, honor, and safety of the Southern people.
Unless checked in its mad career by some potential agency, her future in the Union is already written in the history of emancipation in Jamaica, and the insurrection and desolation in San Domingo.
It is clear that under the Constitution, there is no efficient power in the Government, no special agency, representing the slaveholding interest, capable to resist and overcome the hostility of a majority in both houses of Congress, sustained by executive power.
The minority States have no power in the administration of Government, which can permanently check the growth and progressive action of an irresponsible majority, constituting the Black Republican party, actuated by the combined motives of religious or moral fanaticism and base lust of power and pelf. Against such a party, paper guarantees are mere shams.
It seems to me that the John Brown raid at Harper's Ferry was overblown by the Southern press. The raid itself was put down rather quickly without any Virginia slaves joining the revolt. It is interesting also to note that the possibility of a slave revolt so completely terrified Southerners as far away as Texas.
I am less familiar with the town burnings in Texas about the same period, but it would seem far fetched to blame the Buchanan administration for them. I am generally of the opinion that Texas should not have been admitted to the Union or at best should have been admitted as several states. Without the United States backing, Texas would have remained a weaker and poorer entity, more worried about its overall survival than with reneging on a solemn agreement it made a decade earlier.
"If such outrages can be perpetrated under such a President, would not every home in the South stand in constant danger from the abolitionist incendiary under the Government of Lincoln. Would our wives and little ones enjoy the sweet comforts of peace, and the blessed repose of security? Submission to Lincoln would give us no peace, but would subject us to a reign of terror more horrible than any war."
Wow, is this example representative of the 'logic' southern newspapers were engaged in regarding Lincoln? If so, it's not hard to see how the ordinary southern people came to believe that Secession was their only hope.
I've posted about them before, but I'm having trouble linking to my old post about them. Probably it was in one of those threads that got out of hand with insults and was deleted. Let me know if you want to see it, and I'll repost the old newspaper articles.
Basically, parts of Dallas, Denton, Pilot Point, Belknap, Gainesville, Black-jack Grove, Kaufman, Navarro, Waxahachie, Henderson, Jefferson, Tyler, Georgetown, Bright Star, and Austin either burned or suffered arson attacks that were thwarted. Many of these attacks happened on the same day. A number of the arsonists were caught and confessed.
I don't think the old newspaper article was blaming them on the Buchanan administration. The arsonists were apparently abolitionists. My interpretations is that the old newspaper article was making the point that if this could happen under the Buchanan administration that was at least somewhat favorably inclined toward the South, what might the South expect from a Republican administration that was ill disposed towards the South and might look the other way?
Poor? Until large oil deposits were discovered, perhaps. Texas supplied much of the oil, gasoline and aviation fuel used to win WWII.
My, we could have joined OPEC, LOL, and become even richer. I still remember those bumper stickers that said, "Stay Warm! Let the Yankees Freeze in the Dark."
Solemn agreement? Can you say with a straight face that Northern states were not nullifying the Constitution with regard to the return of runaway slaves?
I am generally of the opinion that Texas should not have been admitted to the Union or at best should have been admitted as several states.
Why not admit Texas? Were you afraid of war with Mexico, the country that those poor weak Texans had held off for almost ten years??
BTW, here's something from the Texas Constitution, which the US de facto accepted when it admitted Texas: "SEC. 1. All political power is inherent in the people, and all free governments are founded on their authority, and instituted for their benefit; and they have at all times the unalienable right to alter, reform, or abolish their form of government, in such manner as they may think expedient."
Yes, I was thinking more in the shorter term say (1850-1875). This would leave the Texans more worried about holding onto what they carved from Mexico without the resources of the United States to help them. Who knows if an independent Texas might have remained neutral during the WBTS, or if Mexico, Spain or France would have tried to regain the territory.
Can you say with a straight face that Northern states were not nullifying the Constitution with regard to the return of runaway slaves?
Hmm, it seems to me the North was exerting their States Rights in that regard, something the South was supposed to be all in favor of...
BTW, here's something from the Texas Constitution, which the US de facto accepted when it admitted Texas:
Yep. Thats part of the reason why I would have been reluctant to admit them in the first place and why it might have been in the long term interest of the Union to have broken Texas up into smaller more manageable pieces. It's conceivable that if broken into sections, some of them would have remained in the Union when the war broke out, effectively neutralizing the parts that didn't. Besides the Confederacy would have been much easier to beat without Texas to contend with :^)
States Rights? By the Tenth Amendment, states retained rights (actually 'powers' rather than 'rights') that were NOT specified or delegated away in the Constitution.
Clearly the return of runaway slaves was covered in the Constitution, so violation of the Constitution by not returning runaway slaves does not fall under the Tenth Amendment and thus is not an example of States Rights.
More likely circuit or appeals court judges were to be added because of changes in population. Supreme Court judges wouldn't simply be allocated to the North or West, so the idea of new Supreme Court seats created for Northerners was more or less a charge the paper disseminated to stir up support for secession.
The "Lincoln Orator" your paper mentions wasn't Stanton, or any real person. It's a fictive construct the paper created to express its own fears. We don't have to put any credence in such fictional quotations put in the mouths of retorical creations.
Prairie fires were a natural part of life on the Great Plains. The Southern Plains are arid and fires frequent. It was 110 degrees in Dallas when the fires struck there. New settlements and the use of the new phosphorus matches made fires even more frequent.
At first it was recognized that the fires were most likely the result of natural conditions plus human carelessness. Only later did the potential for agitation get the better of some editors and politicians. There was a lot at stake.
The settlers in North Texas and what's now Central Texas, but was then the western frontier, tended to be opposed to secession. Now if you were a secessionist who wanted to drum up support for secession, it was a natural move to blame the fires on abolitionist agitators and conspirators. Some of the counties to the North of Dallas were strongly anti-secessionist, but Dallas and its surroundings went for secession largely because of the efforts of a secessionist editor.
Once you get vigilantes and a witchhunt atmosphere it's not hard to find suspects to pin things on. According to one source a vigilante leader said in 1892 "We whipped every negro in the county, one by one" to get confessions and accusations. That may be an exaggeration, but it indicates the way such investigations are likely to procede.
Original sources are great, but in times of crisis they may reflect irrational fears or deliberate deceptions. So some skepticism is advisable.
I agree entirely, but I've found that when I've checked, more often than not the old papers appear to contain accurate information. Not in all cases. I've found that one Mobile Alabama paper was particularly bad about posting false information, so if I see any story originating from that paper I discount it and do not post it.
At first it was recognized that the fires were most likely the result of natural conditions plus human carelessness. Only later did the potential for agitation get the better of some editors and politicians.
If so, it must have involved a fair number of editors and false reports. If the reports of these widespread fires, arrests, and confessions were false, the credibility of the newspapers would have become zilch.
From The Ranchero of Corpus Christi (Ranchero)., July 28, 1860, p. 2, c. 4.
Destructive Fires. —The town of Dallas, Texas, was almost totally destroyed by fire on the 8th inst. Loss $400,000.
Our Austin and other State exchanges bring accounts of most destructive fires in different sections of the State, whereby thousands of dollars worth of property has been destroyed. The general opinion is, that these conflagrations are caused by a regularly organized band of incendiaries.
August 25, 1860, p. 2, c. 6. Nacogdoches in Ashes. — The Texas Pioneer, published in Freestone county says:
From a letter received by A. L. Reed, Esq., dated New Salem, Rusk co., we learn that the town of Nacogdoches was destroyed by fire, on Monday last, the 6th inst. No particulars given in reference to the extent of the fire. No doubt exists of its being the work of abolition cut-throat incendiaries.
The fearful plot seems to be fast culminating, and from all indications we are led to believe that there is not a county in the State but where the organization has been perfected in a greater or less degree.
Attempt to Fire Indianola.—From the Indianola Courier, we learn that that place has had a narrow escape from the destruction of a vast amount of property. On the 13th inst., a house on Water street, adjoining Murdock's livery stable was set on fire, but was fortunately discovered and extinguished before any damage was done. A young man who gave his name as Ed. King, was suspected, he having been seen on the premises but a few minutes before the fire was discovered. King was given to understand that a change of location might be better for his health, and at his election, he accordingly took his departure for New Orleans. These circumstances induced the formation of a Vigilance Committee.
From the Little Rock Arkansas True Democrat (Arkansas True Democrat):
Henderson [Texas]. Dear Sir: I write to apprise you that the work of desolating the country is yet going on. Henderson was burned to ashes on Sunday night, while the guard were at supper. It was fired in eight places. Many wells have been poisoned and the slaves are running away. Be wide awake. These things are perfectly reliable.
Respectfully yours, W. J. Sparks.
Most of the information I've found about the fires comes from microfilms of the Austin Texas State Gazette, the only Texas paper of that time that I have microfilm access to. It printed articles about the fires from other newspapers around the state. I post them below and list the local newspaper from which the story reportedly came.
To put the Gazette in context, its editor was the head of the Democratic Party in Texas. It was strongly against Sam Houston and staying in the Union, and there were many articles on slavery and the need to reopen slave importation to the US in the two or so years before the war. For what it's worth, surprisingly I didn't find a lot in the Gazette about the John Brown raid.
Dallas. The fire was first discovered in front of Peak’s new drug store, on the west side of the square, and continued to spread rapidly until the whole north side were consumed and one half of the east side. … [Lists a bunch of fires a few miles outside of Dallas over the next few days] All of these were so plainly the work of an incendiary, that several white men and negroes were arrested and underwent an examination. This lead to the detection of a most diabolical plan to destroy the county. The scheme was laid by a master mind, and conceived with infernal ingenuity. It was determined by certain abolition preachers who were expelled from the country last year, to devastate with fire and assassination, the whole of Northern Texas, and when the country was reduced to a helpless condition, a general revolt of the slaves aided by white men from the North, and many in our midst, was to come off on the day of election in August. [Letter from a Dallas newspaper publisher, Charles Pryor, July 16, 1860.}
[Pryor was alleged by some to be the instigator of the "Texas Troubles." See Pryor. BTW, Pryor's letter listed the temperature in Dallas as 106 degrees, not 110, as in your post.]
Denton. The fire at Denton occurred on Sunday, 8th July, being the same day as at Dallas. … The whole west side of the public square with the solitary exception of Messrs. Blount & Scruggs store on the extreme N. W. corner is in ashes. [State Gazette, July 28, 1860]
Navarro. These fires have all occurred so near the same time as to evince concert of action by a band of fiends, and the detection at Fort Worth of an abolitionist who had just distributed 50 guns and 50 six shooters among the negroes, places it beyond all doubt that abolition emissaries are at the bottom of it. We rejoice to learn that the man at Fort Worth was hung, and also one in Parker county for a similar act. [Navarro Express, July 21, 1860]
Tyler. Incendiaries. Our town, on Monday night last, was thrown into a fever of excitement, by the detection of an individual, a stranger in our place, in the act of attempting to fire the town. He was shot at two or three times by the patrol, but succeeded in making his escape, not, it is to be hoped, without carrying with him some evidence of the skill of our marksmen. Our people are on the alert, and woe to the scoundrel who, arrested in the act, falls into their hands. [Tyler Reporter, July 18, 1860]
Jefferson. … on that same ominous Sunday the 8th, an attempt was made to fire the buildings in Jeferson, Cass County; one of the buildings was the drug store of Messrs. Campbell & Co., and the other was the Jefferson Hotel. {Herald and Gazette, July 14, 1860]
Georgetown. Last week the stable and kitchen of L. Gaus, of Georgetown, in Williamson county, were destroyed by fire. Suspicion attached to a negro boy, who had been a short time before near the consumed premises. This negro, on being arrested, at first equivocated, and then without whipping, admitted he had set fire to the stable. He stated that he had been instigated to do so by three white men; that he did not know the names of all of them, but knew their faces; that one of them told him he would take him safely to Mexico if he would fire the town, and other mischief. A music teacher, hailing from higher latitudes,finding himself implicated, made it convenient to decamp. He is said to be a Black Republican, and perhaps no the only one in the limits of the rich and fertile county of Williamson.
On Monday last, the citizens of Williamson county assembled en masse, and instead of waiting for the session of the District Court, which sits in September, they organized the court of Judge Lynch, and in their way tried the negro, and hung him about a mile from town. He may have been, and no doubt was, guilty, and richly merited the extreme penalty of the law; yet, would it not have been better to have waited four weeks and tried him according to law. [letter to Galveston News, August 14, 1860]
Bright Star. On yesterday, (Sunday,) about 4 o’clock, there was fire discovered in the kitchen of Dr. Reeves. It appears there had been no fire in the kitchen for some time. The fire was discovered on the opposite side of the house to that of the fire-place. The bed was set on fire first; no damage to any amount. The negroes arrested in Paris confessed that it was their intension, on the day of the election, while the men were at the polls voting, to kill the females at every house, and as the men returned from the polls, they were to be attacked. [Jefferson Herald of August 11, 1860, reporting a story dated July 30, 1860 from Bright Star]
I've heard the explanation you mentioned that it was so hot that summer that new phosphorus matches caught on fire. I'm not convinced that that is the explanation given the fires reported above. One has to be just as skeptical about the match explanation as any other explanation about the fires. Political motivations can be at work in both interpretations of these events.
If you like old newspapers, the Marshall Texas Republican for 1860 is here. It wasn't a Lincoln paper. The title may refer to the old Texas Republic.
And what a record it provides. Blacks found at the scene of fires and shot. Slaves beaten to force confessions. Northern ministers and school teachers hanged because they didn't believe in slavery. Unproven suspicions of slaves with strychnine poisoning wells. Vigilante rule. Runaways and drifters blamed for fires and lynched. Whites hanged for giving aid to Blacks. There was a Jewish peddler interrogated for the crimes and then forced over the county line. A town thrown into an uproar because a Czech newspaper with pictures of Lincoln and Hamlin arrived at the post office for a recent immigrant. Accusations of massive conspiracies and counter accuations of forged documents and false testimony compelled by torture. Not a pretty picture.
You might say that this sort of thing happens wherever fear takes over, and could have happened elsewhere in the country. Fair enough. But slavery and fear of abolitionists played a key role in this story. And you guys go on so much about Yankee evils. There's no solid evidence of any Northern conspiracy, but a clear record of Texas violence. Now we all know about the Salem Witch trials. Shouldn't we know more about this chapter of hysteria in history. Or should we blame it all on the Blacks and the Yankees?
Thanks very much for the link. I hadn't seen that one. There is so much information there it will take me some time to go through it. Did you notice the following article in that link?
[MARSHALL] TEXAS REPUBLICAN, August 4, 1860, p. 2, c. 2
A committee appointed for the purpose at Paris, Texas, has reported that no "thermometer heat will ignite matches." This proves that the late burnings in the northern portion of the State were produced by incendiaries.
I don't know that it proves that incendiaries did it, but it is a blow to the match theory.
My wife and I were out in 109 degree temperature in southern Arizona this year. We saw lots of cactus but no spontaneous combustion of buildings, warehouses, residences, barns, mills, etc.
Violence? In Texas? Yes. Texas was not a place for the timid, though the eastern part of the state was safer than the hill country and the frontier. The Texas frontier and "One Riot, One Ranger" made for some tough characters.
I'm not condoning the violence. The articles I posted mentioned hangings, lynchings, and people expelled from the state for their views. I don't shrink from posting such things about the South. On the other hand, I don't remember you posting about the evils of the Lincoln Administration's treatment of free speech either. Perhaps you have. If so, I stand corrected.
I've posted newspaper reports before about blacks buried alive after Fort Pillow and argued that Confederate leaders should not have fired on Fort Sumter, so don't lecture me about "you guys" going on so much about Yankee evils. If the Yanks had been less "evil," we Southerners wouldn't have so much to post about, and the threads wouldn't be half so informative or interesting.
You might want to read Brush Men & Vigilantes, Civil War Dissent in Texas by David Pickering and Judy Falls which tells the story of suppressed dissent in two Texas counties or "Tainted Breeze, The Great Hanging at Gainesville, Texas, 1862 which tells what happened at Gainesville in a much more balanced fashion that the book (whose name I forget) by one of the descendants of the hanged.
You take the position that there is "no solid evidence of any Northern conspiracy" with respect to the Texas town burnings of 1860. (Mary Mapes, is that you?) To take that position you have to ignore or set aside as unbelievable the confessions of many of the perpetrators.
I take the same position that the Marshall Texas Republican, the paper whose link you kindly provided. Here from November 1860 is what they said about the burnings of the previous summer (some paragraph breaks mine):
Now that the election is over, doubtless the vast majority of our people can regard dispassionately the course pursued by the Opposition party and Governor of Texas [Sam Houston], relative to the recent incendiary movements in this State. They have contended through the press, in their public speeches, and by every means through which the public mind could be reached, that the reports of an abolition raid in Texas were without foundation; that there was not a particle of proof to justify such a belief, and that these reports were originated and circulated for no other design than to make political capital for Breckinridge.
Gen. Houston in his Austin speech, which was republished in the Flag, to the surprise of every right-thinking, intelligent man in the State, made the same statement, denying that there had been, at any time, cause for alarm. Judge Evans, we learn from our exchanges, occupied similar ground, assuming the position that the numerous fires which have occurred in Texas were the result of accident, and out of these causalities, the Breckinridge party set afloat thousands of unfounded rumors calculated and designed to influence the public mind, with a view to manufacture political capital.
What are the facts? The fires alluded to commenced in July last, and, in the short period of one month, property to the amount of over a million of dollars, was destroyed, including two of the largest and most flourishing towns in Eastern Texas. Eleven fires occurred in Northern Texas in one week, involving a loss of upwards of seven hundred thousand dollars. There was scarcely a county in the State that claimed an immunity from these outrages. Farm houses, gins, mills, and stores were destroyed in almost every county. Every newspaper that reached us during those exciting times, contained from one to a half dozen accounts of these burnings.
The people became alarmed, and, as we contend, there was just reason for the liveliest apprehensions. Vigilance committees were formed in every neighborhood. No one ever thought then of denying that it was necessary to adopt measures for our safety. Men met without distinction of party.
That there should have been a great deal of excitement, that many reports should have been circulated having no foundation and that acts of unjustifiable violence should have taken place, were perfectly natural. Such results have followed similar excitements everywhere else, and why should Texas prove different from the rest of the world?
But if the number, frequency, and the accounts given of these fires were insufficient to dispel the idea that they were [illegible line] elicited by committees appointed to examine into the facts, is sufficient to show that that they were caused by incendiaries.
We are free to admit that testimony elicited by violence or fright is not to be depended on, but, in this case, it is a noted fact, that negroes, over a hundred miles apart, in a number of counties, all concurred in the general outlines of this abolition movement.
In addition to this, we have the Bailey letter which the notorious abolitionist Buley who was hung near Fort Worth, acknowledged to be a genuine document. At the time that letter was published in our columns, it was regarded as a document that had been manufactured. Now that it is known to have been written by an active abolitionist, who was in Texas, it may not be uninteresting to give it a more searching examination.
A. W. Sparks, who grew up just across the Hopkins County line in Titus County, recalled that "the thermometer reached 114 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade at my father's house where I was staying, and sulphur matches caught fire and burned their heads off in the little wooden boxes in which they were kept."
The authors of this book do not mention the Paris, Texas, experiments I cited above that failed to ignite matches with high temperatures nor do they mention that a number of the fires reportedly happened after dark or in the morning when the temperature would have been milder. The authors do quote other things from the Paris paper and the Marshall Texas Republican but not the match tests.
The principal author of this book believed he was related to men hanged by vigilantes. His great-grandparents of the same name and in the same area disappeared during the war. I'm not sure one gets an objective book under such circumstances, but I'm glad he acknowledged it. The book provides information from various sources but generally seems to lean to the Union side, IMO. I report the book's match quote from A. W. Sparks as one more piece of evidence in figuring out what really went on.
About the fires: TR Fehrenbach gets quoted a lot here because he's more sympathetic to secessionists than other writers. He's also something of a Texas institution. I looked up his account of the fires in Lone Star. He uses words like "panic" and "paranoia" more than even I would.
The Marshall Texas Republican cites the London Times of September 21, 1860. It gives an account of how things looked to a less involved observer.
"In the pending decennial Census of the United States, Texas is expected to shine, both as regards increase of population and productive capacity. In short, it is predicted that before many years she is likely to stand as the Empire State of the South, as New York is that of the North. For some months past, however, a reign of terror has existed in the country, which at least reached a climax for which a parallel could scarcely be found in the history of the frantic orgies of the early French Revolution. The plea is a fear of insurrection among the slaves. Not a single piece of evidence has been produced to justify any such suspicion, and it is clear that the whole thing arises from the deadly feud between the South and the North, a desire to influence the approaching Presidential election, and also, as Texas is largely indebted to the North, to provide an excuse for the non-payment of liabilities. The State is now entirely at the command of a mob, who burn and destroy at pleasure in order to create a list of 'incendiary' acts by the negroes, and who forge 'intercepted' correspondence against any person whom they may desire to hang. Numbers are thus executed every week, and it is plain that each man holds his life only at the will of an enemy who may choose to point to him as an abolitionist. Negroes and white men are tortured with astounding ferocity, and if, in their agony, they consent to charge any number of persons with having incited them to commit offences, these charges are entirely sufficient as a ground for the death of the inculpated parties. The public journals gloat over each instance of cowardly slaughter, and deal with the whole subject as a theme for humor. According to the records by the last mail 'two white devils were publicly hanged in Anderson county, for having furnished the negroes with more than 100 bottles of strychnine to poison the wells—the 'incontrovertible proof' on the point consisting in allegations made by some of the colored people during 'severe punishment.' In Williamson county three white men and three negroes were hanged on similar pretences. In Upshur county a man named Morrison was hanged in the presence of 500 'citizens,' for the crime, as it is stated, of having been 'charged' with inciting negroes to insurrection. In cook county three white men were hanged, after having, in their desire for life, implicated 15 others, who will doubtless, in due time share the same fate. The San Antonio Ledger announces that a wandering mapseller who had lately visited that city 'has been translated to another sphere of action, and that a negro boy accompanied him in his permanent suspension from earthly duties.' The Galveston News, an old established journal of large circulation, mentions that a Mr. Lemon, 'an abolitionist,' who was under directions to leave the State, had been 'prevented by a material impediment from obeying instructions.' The editor adds, 'We presume he climbed a tree and hurt himself in coming down.' this, it must be observed, is but the record of a single week, and it may be presumed that not a tithe of the events of similar character that occur that find their way into print. The State Government does not make any pretence to check the will of the people, and the federal authorities have not the constitutional right, even if they had the inclination, to do so. In the neighboring States tendencies are exhibited, only in a less extensive form. We thus see that Mexico, although reduced to a pandemonium by its military brigands, may be held up almost as a model of civilization in contrast with the neighbors before whom she is destined to fall. The New York journals denounce with vigor the disgrace thus inflicted on the Union, but it is to be feared that every work they may write will but serve as a stimulus for new horrors in retaliation."
A recent book on the history of "race, ethnicity, and religion" in Dallas, also takes a dim view of the conspiracy theories. Forgive the long excerpt, but it puts together a lot of information that's hard to find in any one place:
Fires and rumors of fires raged across the state in July and August. Pryor blamed the fires on local abolitionists, thereby aggravating an already volatile atmosphere encouraging harassment, intimidation, and violations of civil liberties against political dissidents. Pryor's readers might think that if there was not an abolitionist hiding under every bed, there was at least one dangerous anti-slavery agent in each county. With Pryor's help, the 1860 fires stoked the Texas slaveholding class' already deep fears and rushed the state into the Confederate camp at the beginning of the Civil War.
Pryor's anxiety boiled in 1859 when, during public meetings held August 12 and 13, Solomon McKinney and Parson Blount, two Dallas County residents described as Iowa natives, faced accusations that they advocated "free soil sentiments and abolition doctrines." A mob gave McKinney, a minister, his "walking papers" and told him to leave Texas for daring to "tell Southern men how to manage their servants." Authorities confined McKinney in the county jail to await expulsion. Parson Blount made the mistake of defending McKinney during the public meetings. Blount requested a place in the jail for himself, fearing he would be in danger. The Herald darkly threatened Blount. "[U]ntil he came, all was peace and quiet, harmony and good will," the newspaper said. ". . . He has offended a generous community, who will not soon forgive him; hence, he had better consult his own safety and leave." When Blount and McKinney mysteriously disappeared from jail, the Herald suggested that this happened through the aid of "the Prince of Darkness" or perhaps "the assistance of outside pressure."
In a county with a more than 94 percent literacy rate among whites ages fifteen and older, Pryor's inflammatory warnings about abolitionist conspiracies reached a widespread audience. All year long, Pryor had anticipated a racial conflagration prompted by Northern outsiders. Pryor's predicted holocaust finally arrived on July 8, 1860, when a fire consumed almost all of downtown Dallas. The fire began that hot Sunday between 1:00 and 2:00 P.M. in a rubbish heap outside the W. W. Peak and Brothers drugstore. Temperatures reached 105 degrees that afternoon, and a high southwest wind fed the blaze, which in just five minutes engulfed the store. The flames, fueled partly by chemicals stored at the drugstore, spread fast as "the fire caught most of us in our siesta," Charles Pryor wrote in a letter to the Houston Telegraph. "We barely escaped with our lives—some like myself, without clothes, boots, shoes, or anything else." The fire reduced dry goods stores, groceries, law offices, inns, the three-story St. Nicholas Hotel, and the offices of the Dallas Herald to ashes. Officials calculated the loss at $400,000, with a mere $10,000 of that insured. Some of the richest and most powerful people in Dallas, among them General John Good, attorney Warren Stone, publisher John Swindells, and Alexander Cockrell's widow, Sarah, lost their fortunes in the fire. Volunteer firefighters diverted the inferno from the courthouse, although "the heat was so great that the curtains on the inside of the windows caught fire through the glass." When the fire burned itself out, Dallas smoldered, a smoking ruin.
On the day after the downtown fire, a home burned down a mile and a half from town, inspiring gossip about a conspiracy. Men "with inflamed minds, swearing vengeance," gathered at the courthouse, insisting that Dallas had been targeted by arsonists. District Judge Nat M. Burford left court proceedings in Waxahachie to preside over an inquisition held on the fire. A fifty-two-man Committee of Vigilance formed, and their suspicion quickly settled on slaves and their reputed abolitionist accomplices. If the committee kept any records, including the suspects' alleged confessions, these documents have apparently disappeared. The chief source of information on the investigation is a series of letters Charles Pryor wrote to newspapers across Texas, including the politically allied State Gazette in Austin.
Pryor's letters instigated a statewide panic about a slave revolt inspired by abolitionist outsiders. These letters told the same story: black rebels plotted to set fires across the state, murder white leaders, and poison wells. At a time when prolonged drought made water a much-protected commodity, the rumor that slaves planned to poison water supplies must have inspired particular terror. The slave rebels, Pryor told readers, intended to commit horrors on "certain ladies . . . selected as the victims of these misguided monsters." On July 28 the Austin State Gazette carried Pryor's letter proclaiming the Dallas fire as the opening gambit in a statewide revolution. Abolition preachers "expelled from the country last year" had hatched a scheme to "devastate with fire and assassination" the "whole of Northern Texas." Slave rebels hoped to destroy military targets such as stores of gunpowder, lead, and grain to "[reduce] this . . . country to a state of utter helplessness." The revolution in each county was "under the supervision of a white man, who controls the action of the negroes in that district . . . Many of our most prominent citizens were to be assassinated . . . Arms have been discovered in the possession of the negroes, and the whole plot revealed, for a general insurrection and civil war at the August election."
Blount and McKinney, expelled from Dallas the previous summer, now emerged as masterminds of the revolt. "Bl[o]unt and McKinney, the abolition preachers, were expected here at the head of the large force at that time," Pryor wrote to the State Gazette. "We are expecting the worst, and do not know what an hour may bring forth."
The Committee of Vigilance secretly interrogated nearly one hundred slaves, using torture to extract confessions. The inquisition dragged on for fifteen days as eight suspects languished in jail. The brutalized witnesses implicated all but three of the county's 1,074 slaves. By Texas law, all 1,071 suspects faced the death penalty for insurrection and arson, representing not only a massacre unprecedented in Texas but also a potential financial loss of about $820,000 to slaveowners.
Whipped slaves told the committee what its members already believed, that a slave revolution had begun. "One of the negroes whipped became very sick afterward and thinking that he was going to die, he made a confession to his old mistress, telling her all about the plot," a community leader told the Dallas Morning News in 1892. The committee already had settled upon three suspects—Patrick Jennings, Sam Smith, and another slave called Cato—as the plot's ringleaders. Jennings, brought to Texas by his owner Dr. Roy B. Scott from their native Virginia, belonged at the time of the fire to George W. Guess, a prominent thirty-one-year-old Dallas attorney. "Old Pat continued to be an agitator in Texas as he had been in Virginia," Dr. Scott's son, Samuel, recalled in 1922. Rachel Overton, the widow of Aaron Overton, a successful farmer in the county, owned "Old Cato," a slave highly regarded by the family. The Overtons owned the first mill in the county, which they entrusted Cato to run. Cato "made all decisions regarding priority" at the mill "and many a fee of 25 or 50 cents bestowed on Cato would greatly facilitate your turn," recalled J. O. Cructhfield. Pryor describes the third suspect, Sam Smith, as a slave preacher "who had imbibed most of his villainous principles from two abolitionist preachers," Blount and McKinney. Smith possibly belonged to rich and powerful W. B. Miller. A fourth slave, also owned by Miller, would be identified as a suspected ringleader as well.
The three slaves found themselves targeted because they in some way offended racial etiquette: Jennings perhaps because of an abrasive personality; Cato because he commanded a position of authority at the Overton mill; and Smith because of his highly visible and threatening role as a slave preacher. Slave preachers figured prominently in previous suspected and realized revolts, led by Gabriel Prosser (1800), Denmark Vesey (1822), and Nat Turner (1831). Texas slaveholders often prohibited their servants from holding services, fearing that religious gatherings merely masked meetings where charismatic preachers hatched rebellion. The committee, in any case, carefully selected its victims to teach slaves the value of subservience.
The panic, however, opened a rift between large and small slaveholders. As soon as Burford entered the courthouse, a man cornered him and declared, "Now, we must vote to hang them three negroes, but it won't do to hang too many. We can't afford it. After we get the three let's call up some rich man's negro and make a fight to save him. If we save the rich man's negro the meeting will not then turn around and vote to hang the poor man's negro." Judge Burford apparently became so disturbed by the proceedings that he abruptly left the meeting after only forty-five minutes. Shortly after his departure, the committee voted to execute Jennings, Smith, and Cato. As already agreed upon, a fourth slave belonging to W. B. Miller stood accused of being a ringleader as well. "Sure enough a fight was made to save him and succeeded, but Miller said the negro shouldn't stay in the county, and he afterward sent him away," Burford said. The committee further decided to whip every slave in the county. With all sides satisfied, the committee announced its decision on July 23 to the agitated mob outside. Jennings, Smith, and Cato faced hanging the next day. Shortly thereafter, "we whipped every negro in the county one by one," a source later told the Dallas Morning News. One witness, David Carey Nance, recalled slaves being rounded by "like cattle" and whipped "without mercy." Some slaves were almost beaten to death. The sight of the mass floggings, Nance later said, "made his blood run cold."
All whites of free-state origin now became targets of suspicion. "At that time there was considerable wagon immigration to this country from the north, and the idea somehow gained currency that those Northern people were coming down here and supplying the negroes with firearms and ammunitions," a member of the vigilance committee later said. "People actually held up the wagons and searched them as they entered the town, but nothing was ever found to confirm these suspicions."
On July 24, officials led the three purported ringleaders from the jail to the bank of the Trinity River near the site where the Commerce Street Bridge later spanned the waterway. A gallows, in close view of an "immense concourse of citizens and negroes," awaited the accused rebels. Jennings remained calm and "betrayed no remorse or feeling whatever in view of his approaching doom." Displaying "unparalleled nonchalance," he made no final words and died with a "chew of tobacco in his mouth." If the committee meant to terrify the assembled slaves in the audience, they accomplished their mission. The executioner apparently made a mistake tying the noose around Jennings' neck. The slave's neck did not break as intended. Jennings slowly strangled, "dying very hard," as he swung from the scaffolding.
The hangings heralded a season of violence in Texas. Fires causing an estimated one million dollars in damages were reported in fourteen North and Central Texas counties. The accompanying hysteria lasted eight weeks. Paranoia gained momentum as the August statewide elections approached when "the Bailey Letter" was supposedly found near Fort Worth. Reportedly written by William H. Bailey to the Reverend Anthony Bewley, the only Texas elder of the anti-slavery Methodist Episcopal Church, the letter purportedly outlined in great detail an unfolding abolitionist scheme to set fires across the state and murder slaveowners.
The "hellish document," reportedly uncovered by a "most reliable and undoubted source," was sent to the Belton Democrat, edited by John Henry Brown (at that time retired as a fire-eater state legislator and yet to become mayor of Dallas). Brown advised slaveowners to "whip no abolitionist, drive off no abolitionist—hang them, or let them alone." In response to the circulation of the Bailey Letter, local assemblies called for opening mail to check for subversive literature, compiling "black lists" of Republicans and abolitionists to be hanged, and monitoring suspected traitors for anti-slavery activities. Texas became a killing field where historian Alwyn Barr has estimated that mobs executed eighty slaves and thirty-seven suspected white abolitionists as a result of what the New Orleans Daily Picayune labeled "the Texas Troubles." As historian Wendell G. Addington suggested, pro-slavery Texans believed it was better to "hang ninety-nine innocent men than to let one guilty one pass." One Mississippi newspaper editor sardonically described Texas slaves as "dancing to the music of the cracking of the necks of the Abolitionists." This music, the Austin State Gazette predicted, would last until the final abolitionist was "elevated on his platform."
By late September much of the fear and passion that stirred over the summer had burned out, and even some ardent fire eaters began to doubt whether a plot ever existed. The New Orleans Daily Picayune held as dim a view of "Black Republicans" as the Dallas Herald, yet on September 8 the Picayune editor concluded that "not half of what has been confessed seems to have been born out by later facts . . . wells thought to have been poisoned . . . [were] untainted by any deleterious substance." The fact that many of the slave suspects possessed guns, a violation of Texas law, was neither unusual nor sinister but reflected common frontier practice. There is reason to suspect that "the Texas troubles" were a series of accidents exploited by pro-secessionists to intimidate their opposition. Many fires reported in the press never took place. For instance, the burning of trash behind the Brenham courthouse sparked a panic there, while a newspaper editor in Weatherford expressed his surprise at reading in another city's newspaper a false report that Weatherford had been set ablaze. Many of the fires that did occur happened in a time of drought that would facilitate accidental fires.
One might question the authenticity of the Bailey Letter, suddenly produced by a newspaper editor who was one of the fiercest fire-eater voices. Why one plotter wrote a letter to a co-conspirator not to convey new information but to review details of capital crimes already under way is hard to fathom. If the 1860 rebellion was authentic, it must rank as the strangest in history. One would have to believe that slaves and abolitionists feverishly worked to set fires simultaneously across the state and then passively waited to be arrested. During the chaos of the 1860 fires, no slaves attempted to seize forts or ammunition stores. No slaves killed or injured whites. No slaves took hostages. No slaves poisoned wells or fired shots in anger. If there was a second phase to this rebellion beyond setting fires, no participant seems to have reached that page in the playbook.
Rather than uncover a conspiracy, the Committee of Vigilance in Dallas most likely ruthlessly exploited a tragedy to pursue a political agenda. The statements of an unnamed member of the committee in a July 1892 Dallas Morning News retrospective on the blaze cast doubt on the proceedings. Requesting anonymity and telling the reporter that he voted against the convictions of the three slaves, he claimed that the Dallas fire was a simple accident. "When the town was burned it was a hot day—so hot that matches ignited from the heat of the sun," the committee member said. "Wallace Peak had just finished a new two-story frame building and in the upper story that day a number of men were lounging and smoking." Near the Peak drugstore, he said, were "a lot of boxes filled with shavings, and I think a cigar stump or a match was thrown into one of the boxes, and from that the fire started . . . somebody had to hang; and the three negroes went."
We don't have to agree with everything Michael Phillips writes in his book to see some sense in it. Indeed, I'm sure we'd both find a lot to disagree with in the later chapters, but even now, fires start at rubbish heaps and from stray cigarettes and matches. A century and a half ago there were no end of pioneers moving westward stocked with gunpowder, matches, and oil or candles who a mob could accuse of being arsonists. And yes, it is strange to find a letter that tells the recipient so much of what he already knows.
If there was a plot, why was it so feeble and ineffectual? "Bleeding Kansas" had given the country a notion of what civil war looked like. And there were plenty of veterans of the Kansas conflict to do the work if an insurrection was planned. Where was the "second stage" of the "rebellion"? Why did the supposed terrorists simply set fires and then wait to be arrested? Where was the supposed uprising?
FWIW, the modern safety match was invented in 1844 and patented in 1855. Probably in 1860 you'd have some safety matches circulating, along with others of the older, more dangerous sort that was liable to flare up on its own, and some knock-offs that claimed or attempted to be safe but really weren't. A Swedish company had a monopoly on safety matches for a long time, so most in circulation would have been the dangerous "Lucifer" matches. Spontaneous combustion of matches was only one possible cause fires, but it can't simply be dismissed.
I had seen the London Times article in the link to the Marshall paper that you sent. Like you say they were indeed less involved observers, but that doesn't mean that they were necessaily objective observers. Today's Guardian could be characterized as being less involved with American affairs, but I certainly wouldn't characterize them as objective.
Thanks for the input about the Dallas fire starting in a trash heap [your White Metropolis link]. I hadn't heard that.
The material you posted about Dallas mentioned that there was a fire about a mile and a half from Dallas and that triggered people into thinking the fires were more than coincidence. Pryor's letter published in the July 28, 1860, State Gazette says the following:
On Monday, the next day [after Dallas burned], the house of John J. Eakens, one mile from town was fired. On Wednesday, the handsome establishment of E. P. Nicholson, was fired but discovered in time to arrest the flames. On Thursday, the stables, out-houses, grain and oats belonging to Crill Miller, Esq., 8 miles from Dallas were destroyed by fire.
The quote you cited said that the New Orleans Daily Picayune held as dim a view of Black Republicans as the Dallas Herald. I don't know the position of the Dallas Herald. The Picayune was a pro-Union paper in 1860 and was characterized as "formerly Union" in 1861 writings by other newspapers. The Picayune devoted whole pages to anti-secession arguments in 1860. Of course, they could well have been against both secession and Republicans.
Thanks for your input.
I think the section you're referring to is this one. Is that right?
"No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due."
...so violation of the Constitution by not returning runaway slaves does not fall under the Tenth Amendment and thus is not an example of States Rights.
Leaving aside the moral aspects of this question for a moment [or the fact that slavery is not explicitly cited in the Constitution], there is plenty of room for interpretation of what it means to 'deliver up', what a 'claim of the party' is and how it is determined whether 'service or labour' is in fact due. However, let's be clear that the North had no obligation to be proactive about rounding up escaped slaves, or enforcement of any other discriminatory practice the South was engaged in whatsoever. In fact, it would seem to me that States would have wide latitude in how they met their constitutional obligations in this regard, and incumbent on the citizens of other States to pay attention to and obey State laws in that regard. -btw There are plenty of accounts of Southern slave-hunters simply grabbing any Negroes they found up North and claiming they were escaped slaves, whether they were or not and whether they [the slave hunters] represented the 'claimant' or not. Wouldn't you agree?
You mean like these state laws?
Sec. 10. Any person who shall grant any certificate under or by virtue of the acts of congress, mentioned in the preceding section [the Fugitive Slave Act], shall be deemed to have resigned any commission from the Commonwealth which he may possess, his office shall be deemed vacant, and he shall be forever thereafter ineligible to any office of trust, honor or emolument under the laws of this Commonwealth.
Sec. 11. Any person who shall act as counsel or attorney for any claimant of any alleged fugitive from service or labor, under or by virtue of the acts of congress mentioned in the ninth section of this act, shall be deemed to have resigned any commission from the Commonwealth that he may possess, and he shall be thereafter incapacitated from appearing as counsel or attorney in the courts of this Commonwealth...
Sec. 14. Any person holding any judicial office under the constitution or laws of this Commonwealth, who shall continue, for ten days after the passage of this act, to hold the office of United States commissioner, or any office...which qualifies him to issue any warrant or other process...under the [Fugitive Slave Act] shall be deemed to have violated good behavior, to have given reason for the loss of public confidence, and furnished sufficient ground either for impeachment or for removal by address.
Sec. 15. Any sheriff, deputy sheriff, jailer, coroner, constable, or other officer of this Commonwealth, or the police of any city or town, or any district, county, city or town officer, or any officer or other member of the volunteer militia of this Commonwealth, who shall hereafter arrest...any person for the reason that he is claimed or adjudged to be a fugitive from service or labor, shall be punished by fine...and by imprisonment...
No.. [chuckle] those State laws were specifically written to counteract Congress and Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, not the US Constitution per se.
I thought the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. And Lincoln said he would enforce it.
Am I getting the two slave acts confused? I know SCOTUS ruled before 1850 that some of the Northern state laws to circumvent the earlier act were indeed unconstitutional.
Cite the Constitution where it says that.
Not that it matters, Merryman was penned by Taney, acting in his role as chief justice of the SCOTUS. It was not appealed and stands as settled (if ignored) law.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
