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?
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.
