Texas slave insurrection panic of 1860
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The Texas slave insurrection panic of 1860, also known as the Texas Troubles, was a moral panic or mass hysteria and a resulting massacre in North and East Texas. Vigilantes killed an estimated 30 to 100 people whom they claimed had been planning a conspiracy of coordinated arson and slave rebellion. Law-enforcement agencies stepped aside to allow extrajudicial killing of Black Texans and of white people thought to be abolitionists. Historians consider the conspiracy to have been imaginary as almost no evidence of arson or rebellion was ever produced.
Popular attribution of the conspiracy to the supporters of Abraham Lincoln contributed to Southern secession from the Union upon Lincoln's election later in 1860, and thus to the American Civil War.
Panic about slave rebellion was common among white people throughout the antebellum South. Although organized rebellions were rare, occasional real examples such as Nat Turner's slave rebellion added to the apprehension that lead to panics over imagined rebellions. The population of slaves in Texas more than tripled in the decade leading up to 1860. Southerners were particularly fearful that the growing abolitionist movement would attempt to organize rebellion.[1]: 1–8
Local Texas governments expelled their Tejano or Mexican population because they believed Tejanos were unsupportive of slavery. Uvalde passed a law that Mexicans could not even pass through the county without a permit in 1857. Tejanos were murdered in the Cart War and numerous other attacks. Texans also attacked abolitionist ministers, particularly following John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859. A book burning targeted textbooks that vigilantes in Palestine, Texas considered an abolitionist conspiracy.[1]: 14–21
The panic
On July 8, 1860, fires broke out in more than a dozen Texas towns, destroying parts of Dallas, Denton, Pilot Point, and other communities. The fires were likely caused by the extremely hot and dry weather – 110 °F (43 °C) was reported that day in Dallas – and, in particular, by stores of white phosphorus matches which spontaneously combust in high heat.[2][1]: 32
Citizens generally accepted that the fires in their towns were caused by the hot weather. However, vigilantes in Dallas began to torture Black residents they considered suspicious, forcing confessions of arson.[1]: 35 Three scapegoats named Patrick Jennings, Sam Smith, and Cato were executed. Charles R. Pryor, editor (before it burned down) of the Dallas Herald, wrote letters to other newspapers in the region describing the fires as a conspiracy "systematically conceived and the most ingeniously contrived"[3] by two allegedly abolitionist Methodist ministers who had been expelled from Dallas a year before. Pryor believed the ministers wanted "to devastate, with fire and assassination, the whole of Northern Texas"[2] by recruiting opponents of slavery to commit arson, and then to cause a slave revolt on an upcoming election day.[3]
Pryor's letters were widely reprinted. Panic spread, and many communities in Texas formed vigilance committees to respond to the alleged conspiracy with racist violence. Through tortured confessions and their own paranoia, vigilance committees elaborated a complex conspiracy, imagining a white command hierarchy directing an army of Black arsonists, assassins, poisoners, and wife-stealers.[1]: 37
Dubious reports of fires, attempted arson, and abolitionist murder plots spread throughout the region. In Austin the mayor's office reported discovering caches of gunpowder, knives and other weapons in slave's quarters. The weapons were presumed to belong to white conspirators who could not be located.[4][1]: 40–41 Fearful residents closed businesses and took up arms.[3][1]: 40
Night patrols hunted slaves, white Northerners, foreigners, Mexican Texans or anyone who didn't answer patrollers' questions to their satisfaction, were immediately lynched. Others were convicted in show trials and hung in public places.[5] Law enforcement agencies allowed the secretive vigilantes to murder anyone the vigilantes accused of being an arsonist or abolitionist. Fort Worth's vigilance committee declared, "it is better for us to hang ninety-nine innocent men than to let one guilty one pass."[5] According to historians, an estimated 30 to 100 people were killed, although "no hard evidence was ever adduced to prove the guilt of a single alleged Black arsonist or White abolitionist."[2]