McCaslin, Richard B

Baton Rogue. 1994. Louisiana State University Press. 1st American Edition. Very Good in Dustjacket. 0807118257. 264 pages. hardcover. keywords: History America Texas Civil War. FROM THE PUBLISHER - In the early morning hours of October 1, 1862, state militia arrested more than two hundred alleged Unionists from five northern Texas counties and brought them to Gainesville, the seat of Cooke County. In the ensuing days at least forty-four prisoners were hanged, and several other men were lynched in neighboring communities. This event proved to be the grisly climax of a tradition of violence and vigilantism in North Texas that began before the Civil War and lasted long afterward. For this first full-scale history of the Great Hanging, Richard B. McCaslin has consulted a vast array of manuscript collections and government archives, assembling a trove of information on a remote corner of the Confederacy. He offers an account that is both rich in detail and illuminating of the broader contexts of this dramatic event. The irony of the Great Hanging, McCaslin maintains, is that the vigilantes and their victims shared a concern for order and security. When perennial fears of slave insurrection and hostile Indian attacks in North Texas were exacerbated by the turmoil of the Civil War, those residents who saw a return to Federal rule as the way to restore stability were branded as sowers of discord by those who remained loyal to the Confederacy, the manifest symbol of order through legal authority. McCaslin follows the course of mounting tensions and violence that erupted into the massive, hysterical roundup of suspected Union sympathizers. He provides a virtual day-by-day report of the deliberations of the 'Citizens Court,' a body that became in effect an instrument for mob violence, which spread far beyond Gainesville. In Tainted Breeze, McCaslin moves past the details of why individual participants acted as they did in the Great Hanging and examines the influence of such factors as economic conditions and family relationships. inventory #30249 ISBN: 0807118257.