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.