Note in the article that the Mayor Pro Tem Ray Nichols of Gainesville goes on record calling the Great Hanging, "That other thing?" and stating, "I don't think that's important to anybody." Nichols' comment was insensitive, rude, arrogant, and unbecoming of a public official. He owes an apology to those of us with an ancestor who died in the hanging!
After 150 years, a dark chapter of Gainesville's past still stirs passions
BY STEVE CAMPBELL
sfcampbell@star-telegram.com
GAINESVILLE -- Rand
McNally recently named this North Texas town America's Most Patriotic City, but
that red, white and blue slogan has collided with a grisly episode from 150
years ago: the Great Hanging of 1862, when vigilantes hanged 40 Union sympathizers
and shot two more who tried to escape.
The Civil War incident
that pitted neighbors against neighbors in a paroxysm of suspicion and
retaliation remains a touchy subject here, particularly for families whose
ancestors were strung up from an elm tree not far from the courthouse.
They say the city of
16,000 has always tried to duck the dark episode that at the time sparked
outrage in the North and drew applause across the South.
"People damn well
try to whitewash it," said 89-year-old L.D. Clark, a retired English
professor whose great-grandfather Nathaniel M. Clark was hanged on Oct. 13,
1862, leaving behind a wife and seven children, including a son in the Rebel
army.
Mayor Jim Goldsworthy
says Gainesville isn't "running away from the horrible event."
The city would rather
"hang our moniker on being the most patriotic town in America and drive
our tourism that way."
The latest contretemps
flared when a local museum planning an Oct. 12-13 event to mark the 150th
anniversary put up a billboard in late August off Interstate 35 promoting it as
"October's Reign of Terror, Commemorating the Great Hanging of 1862."
It quickly came down
when Cooke County Heritage Society directors bailed on the event after Mayor
Pro Tem Ray Nichols voiced his disapproval with the "sensational"
marketing to the director of the Morton Museum, which the society manages.
"We received some
information that intimidated the executive board, and we decided to
cancel," said Steve Gordon, a retired engineer and former president of the
society who organized the event. "We got scared because the city gives the
museum money. I'm very bitter about it. Gainesville has been hiding from the
Great Hanging since it happened."
Nichols, a retired
banker, said he wasn't acting in his official capacity but as a private
individual and contributor to the museum who felt the billboard "put the
city in a bad light."
He also didn't
appreciate that the event was scheduled on the weekend of the city's Depot
Days, an annual celebration of the area's railroad history.
"Gainesville was
voted most patriotic city in America this year, and we are very excited about
it and our Medal of Honor Host City program. I think those are important. That
other thing? I don't think that's important to anybody," he said.
Don't tell that to
Colleen Carri, Clark's niece and a heritage society board member who decided to
keep the commemoration alive by pairing it with the annual Clark family reunion
Oct. 13.
Carri expects 220
attendees, including descendants of six other hanging victims, at the event
called Remembering Our Past, Embracing Our Future.
With cities across the
country commemorating Civil War anniversaries, she said, Gainesville is missing
out.
"I don't get
their mentality except they are afraid it's going to tarnish this most patriotic
thing. They didn't know how to spin it; they didn't know what to do with
it."
But this might be one
where spin couldn't win.
"Having a
celebration of a time when they hanged people being loyal to the United States
would not go well with the most patriotic town label," said University of
North Texas professor Richard B. McCaslin, one of the event's speakers and the
author of Tainted Breeze: The Great Hanging at Gainesville, Texas
1862.
The Rebel line
There's another
skirmish line on this old battlefront, and it is cloaked in gray. Some North Texans with
the Sons of Confederate Veterans believe the Unionists were traitors, and
they've produced a movie to tell the "complete history" based on two
controversial accounts by men involved in the hangings.
David Moore of
Weatherford has two ancestors who were ringleaders of the Unionists -- Henry
Childs, a doctor, and his brother, Ephraim, who were the first to be hanged."If I was living back then and I knew what those brothers did, I would have hung them, too. It was treason," said Moore, the director of Black October 1862, which will be screened Oct. 13 at the Masonic Lodge in Gainesville.
"Were there innocent people hung? Yes. We're saying there is more to it than what has been presented in the literature out there," Moore said.
Most people only know
the victims' stories, said Joe White of Gainesville, the First Lieutenant
Commander of the Lee-Bourland Camp 1848 of the SCV. (Col. James Bourland, a
"good fighter and good hater," led the troops that rounded up the
Unionists.)
"It was the
Confederate States of America. They were under military law," White said.
"If you have people feeding information to the enemy, what are they?"
Monumental divide
The lingering schism
between Gainesville's link to the Confederacy and the mass hanging is
"strikingly illustrated" by two monuments, McCaslin said.
On the front lawn of
the Cooke County Courthouse, a monolith topped with a Rebel soldier stands
watch over the square.
Part of the 1911
monument's flowery inscription reads "no nation rose so white and fair
none fell so pure of crime," which makes Clark grimace.
"So pure of
crime?" growls Clark, who 30 minutes before had read an inscription on his
great-grandfather's grave at the Clark Cemetery that said he was "Murdered
by a Mob."A few blocks away, the town's lone marker for the Great Hanging stands forlornly among piles of construction debris from a flood control project.
"What's
fascinating is that this account on this marker is the only evidence of the
Great Hanging in Cooke County. There's not a marker with any of the victims'
names on it," Carri said.
Goldsworthy says the
site will be restored when the construction is done.
The marker was once
located across I-35 "as far away as you could get from the town
center," said McCaslin, who added that now-deceased former Mayor Margaret
Hayes pushed for a Great Hanging park and got the monument moved.
"She saw it as a
tourism possibility. People like that sort of ghoulish stuff," he said.
"Some places have turned their dark days into big tourist attractions,
like the Salem witch trials in New England. They've managed to flip it over.
Maybe we're not far enough away yet."
"A pressure
cooker"
In 1862, Cooke County
was a remote outpost of the Confederacy. Only 10 percent of the households had
slaves, and it had voted 2-to-1 against secession while Texas as a whole was
3-to-1 in favor of it.
Located just south of
the Red River, Gainesville was a frontier town beset by threats. Just north was
Indian Territory. Deserters and outlaws roamed the border lands. To the west,
Comanche Indians ruled.
"These people
were living in a pressure cooker," McCaslin said.
When the war started
in 1861, many Union supporters volunteered for frontier guard units in hope of
avoiding fighting in the East. But the Confederate Conscription Act of April
1862 changed everything, McCaslin said.
A loose affiliation of
men formed a secretive Union League with a primary aim of avoiding the draft,
he said.
But rumors were soon
rampant that the group had grown to 1,700 and had John Brown-style plans to
storm militia arsenals in Gainesville and Sherman and then aid an invasion.
Bourland's troops
arrested more than 150 men on Oct. 1, and Confederate Col. William C. Young
formed a citizen's court of 12 jurors of mostly slaveholders. Seven Unionist
leaders were hanged, and then a mob lynched 14 more, McCaslin said.
The rest of the
suspects were to be released, but "the real killing started" the next
week after unknown assailants murdered Young and another man, he said.Nineteen more men were then convicted and hanged. Over the course of the day, two prisoners at a time were hanged from the back of a wagon.
But Gainesville wasn't
alone in its fear and retaliation. In Decatur, five Unionist suspects were
hanged, and a prisoner was shot in Denton. Earlier, in August, 19 Unionist
German settlers fleeing from the Hill Country to Mexico had been killed in the
Battle of Nueces, and nine prisoners were executed.
Neighbors torn apart
McCaslin has never
found evidence of communication between people in North Texas and Union
authorities.
"I think it was
just talk. That infuriates some people; they want me to tell them these were
horrible traitors that deserved to be killed. But traitors to what? They were
actually loyal to the country they had been raised in all their lives."
What remains most
fascinating for McCaslin is how quickly neighbors turned on one another.
"But it is not
the first time and it's not the last time. We see it today. Under pressure
people can do very unreasonable things.
"When you bring
something like this to light, smelling to high heaven, it undermines the idea
of a united South. To me, it makes it a more human story because we always
divide. It's what we do; it's what we are. It's the nature of a democracy. Sometimes
we handle it well, and sometimes we don't handle it well at all.
"That upsets
people; they don't want to hear that Great-Great-Grandpa made a mistake."
Steve Campbell, 817-390-7981
Read more here: http://www.star-telegram.com/2012/10/07/4318432/after-150-years-a-dark-chapter.html#storylink=cpy
