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You may remember that the state of Texas had experienced a rash of town burings in the summer of 1860 alleged to have been done by abolitionists..

See the Great Hanging at Gainesville from the Handbook of Texas Online

There were no "rash of fires". There were no "slave uprisings" and there was no Unionist Conspiracy. What there was were mobs of Secessionists who violated more civil liberties and constitutional protections in one small Texas town than happened in all of the Union under Lincoln. Dozens of innocent people were hanged and shot by the noble slaveocracy and their willing thugs (and future members of the KKK.) Similar events took place across the South where any real or imagined opposition was ruthlessly crushed without benefit of due process.

The Lost Cause brigade hates the have the word "Gainesville" mentioned because it shoots the legs right out from under their "Lincoln the Tyrant" mythology.

War time, in any nation, can be dangerous for dissenters. But during the American Civil War, being a Copperhead in the North was infinitely safer than being a Unionist behind Confederate lines. A Copperhead took the chance of prison only if his rhetoric reached the point of open sedition. A Unionist in the South faced near absolute certainty of either a rope or a bullet if he were discovered.

There were no "rash of fires". There were no "slave uprisings" and there was no Unionist Conspiracy.

From the Marshall Texas Republican, November 1860, cited upthread:

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. ...

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.

The Lost Cause brigade hates the have the word "Gainesville" mentioned because it shoots the legs right out from under their "Lincoln the Tyrant" mythology.

LOL. The two are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Lincoln can be a tyrant, and the mob at Gainesville can be a lynch mob.

You linked to a Handbook of Texas Online article on Gainesville by Richard McCaslin. I suggest that you read McCaslin's more detailed description of what happened at Gainesville in his 1994 book, "Tainted Breeze, The Great Hanging at Gainesville, Texas, 1862," published by the Louisiana State University Press. I covered this subject in a previous thread. Perhaps you missed those discussions though you were posting on the thread in question.

See Link, posts 676 and 687.