Tainted breeze

by Richard B. McCaslin

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 insurre