Let's Remember Some Civil Unrest! The Texas Troubles

WYTS: Dallas Cowboys. Original post here.

Most histories pre-Civil War make a note of how weak US leadership was during this period. Presidents like Franklin Pearce and James Buchanan are remembered for inaction, if they're remembered at all. That's actually looking at them in a positive light: if only they did nothing. These were pro-slavery guys, and the status quo was fine for them, even as it became increasingly unworkable and embarrassing. As long as the South had a solid hold on power, their barbaric way of life was safe. In 1860, that was going to change, everybody knew it even before the election. The Whig Party had already disintegrated over slavery earlier in the decade, and the Democratic Party was ripping itself in two. That meant this terrifyingly anti-slavery guy named Abe Lincoln was going to win. The South was extremely normal about losing political control, which is why in July of 1860, much of Northeast Texas fell into a mass hysteria called The Texas Troubles.

For some context, Texas was a slave state. They had defeated a Mexican army led by General Antonio de Padua María Severino López de Santa Anna y Pérez de Lebrón for the right to own other people, who would have no rights. But Texas also knew they were on the frontier limits of the slave economy’s expansion. The classic plantation system could work in the subtropical east of Texas, but as you went further west into the prairie and deserts, cotton just wasn’t going to grow. Kansas in the 1850s was a battlefield for slavery’s expansion, but only as a political question, it never made sense economically. There were 200 slaves at most in Kansas at any point. (Texas, meanwhile, had a third of its population as slaves.) If the country kept expanding west, the Cotton Kingdom would not expand with it. The inevitability of demographics meant that the Slave South would only get weaker. Lincoln in 1860 was just the start.

Thus, already, Texans are arguing about the big, scary S-word, "Succession" in the late 1850s. Texas could have mostly stayed out of the war as a slave-owning union state, like Kentucky or Missouri. As 1860 began, it may have even been leaning towards pro-Union. Governor Sam Houston, the hero of the revolution who defeated General Antonio de Padua María Severino López de Santa Anna y Pérez de Lebrón, was clearly against succession and had won his 1858 governor race on that platform.

Then in the summer of 1860, the entire state panicked over a slave uprising.

Thing is, as far as modern historians can tell, there was no plan in the summer of 1860 to spark a slave rebellion in Texas. There was no enemy out there. The only evidence seems to be some weapons discovered in a slave’s quarters, some confessions under threat of mob violence, and one newspaper man’s fiery essay. (Newspapers sure play a negative role in a lot of these stories, don’t they?)

For yet more context, this is a scary time for the South, even with slave power at its theoretical ascendancy. They won major political victories with the Fugitive Slave Act, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision. But on the other hand, these victories were so annoying that slavery was now the only question on anybody’s mind. Then there were some actual attacks on slavery, such as John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry in October of 1859, a largely quixotic effort to begin a spark a slave uprising against the white masters. Unfortunately, John Brown having one of the most magnificent beards of the 19th century did not mean his band of about 20 people could fight off an army led by Robert E. Lee.

Panics were becoming more and more common in Texas as this decade wore on. The white settlers loved to attack their Mexican neighbors for fear they would help the slaves escape over the border, into civilized Mexico where slavery was illegal. Then there’s the story of a little town called Dallas, a podunk nothing of about 678 people which will probably never amount to anything. In 1859, a Dr. Charles R. Pryor was writing for the local paper, The Dallas Herald, as its editor. He was certain two Methodist preachers were agents of abolitionism. Led by Pryor’s reports, the town had the ministers whipped and exiled.

Then in summer 1860, even with the scary Methodists gone, the fears had ended. It was a blazing hot July, with 110 degree temperatures reported on July 8th. All at once, fires erupted across multiple towns in Texas, including Denton, Pilot Point, and little Dallas. It was suspiciously coordinated, all on the same day, maybe even the same hour. People assumed this was the work of Republican abolitionist terrorists. There was this group of anti-slavery youth marchers called the Wide Awakes (the Republican Woke), who seemed very scary to Texans. …Or maybe it was white phosphorus matches which were popular at the time and were prone to combust when stored in large quantities at high temperatures. 

 

(Oh, and these matches would rot your face bones and mutilate your jaw out if you were a factory worker making them - just a fun little side story.)

At this point, Dr. Pryor, operating out of a new newspaper building since his old one had burnt down, began to write panicky letters of a vast conspiracy to the state. 'This was sabotage', his fiery essays implied, 'this was war'. On July 23rd, three Black men were executed at the county courthouse in Dallas: Patrick Jennings, Sam Smith, and a slave whose name I could only verify as “Old Cato”. This was a compromise from a suggestion to hang all the slaves in the county, which was considered economically unfeasible. Meanwhile, the contagion of panic spread all over the state. Under the threat of mob violence, the accused confessed to anything, including the imagined conspiracy.

In Austin, caches of weapons were discovered. There is a story of a strange powdery poison being found in a slave’s quarters. That turned out to be baby powder. Lynchings, show trials, and violence against slaves, freemen, northerners, or Mexicans spread everywhere. Sources on this entire event are hard to find, real scholarship needs to be done on the Texas Troubles, so any estimates as to how many people were killed is rough. I can't even verify how many incidents and in which places. It seems like every essay online has a different figure, but a good guess is somewhere around 10 killed, mostly Black slaves, but maybe as many as thirty whites too.

Lincoln win the presidency, as everybody knew he would. Texas was still so frightened of their own shadows that in 1861, they indeed voted to secede. Governor Houston was ousted from office, remaining pro-Union to his political end. There were still very pro-Union voices in Texas, especially a German Texan population who were massacred in 1862. In Gainesville, about 41 men were hanged in a mass execution in October 1862, suspected pro-Unionist. (That's the event depicted in this image above.)

 

In effect, Texas fought itself as much as the Union. Texas was a periphery theater in the war, with the state supplying about 70,000 troops to the lost cause. It was never important enough to warrant a full Union invasion. John Bell Hood was a Texan, and was one of the worst generals in the war.

The slaves were freed in 1865. Dr. Pryor seems to have left Texas sometime after the war and passed away in Boston years later. The Lone Star State would prefer you think of it as the land of cowboys and rugged individualistic heroes. The truth is a little different.