In October 1862, a local militia in Cooke County hunted down and arrested 150 farmers suspected of being Unionists, Indian sympathizers or abolitionists living among residents of a Confederate North Texas.
Forty farmers were sentenced to death by their friends, neighbors and Confederate officers in a “citizen’s court” set up in a grocery store in Gainesville. They were just a few of the many supposed sympathizers who were hanged in neighboring Grayson, Wise and Denton counties during a war that divided a nation.
Their deaths became known as “The Great Hanging at Gainesville, Texas, October 1862.”
The Great Hanging Memorial Foundation is inviting the public to a formal dedication of two etched granite monuments that memorialize the farmers. The event takes place at 3 p.m. today at Georgia Davis Bass Memorial Park, 729 E. Main St. in Gainesville.
The granite monuments were unanimously approved by the Gainesville City Council in December 2013, with funding made possible through private donations.
It’s taken 152 years to pay homage to the dead because many scholars and lay persons still disagree on the appropriate interpretation of the event, according to The Great Hanging Memorial Foundation. Some contend the action that led to the “great hanging” was justified, while others argue the tragic event was nothing more than vigilante mob violence.
Dr. Richard B. McCaslin, a history professor at the University of North Texas, is an expert on the Great Hanging. In 1994, he wrote the Tainted Breeze: The Great Hanging at Gainesville, Texas 1862, a book that many consider the definitive source for information about the events that unfolded on that October day a year after the Civil War began.
“How did neighbors do that?” McCaslin asked during his presentation last year at the Allen Public Library that was recorded and posted on YouTube. “This is a pressure cooker [issue]. When all this happened, it had been a building conflict.”
McCaslin said North Texas was a newly settled area, and the people pouring into the region brought the same conflicts dividing the North and the South, including slaves to help produce crops.
There were people who did not want slaves, he said. They were mistrustful of slaves, and this mistrust, fear and conflict divided the Carolinas, Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia, and those were the people who were moving into North Texas.
Another problem feeding this “pressure cooker” issue was the constant Indian raids. The Comanche and their allies, the Kiowa and Arapahos, were always raiding, always pushing the line of white people back east, he said.
People in North Texas began to fear when the full moon shown across the region, he said, because they knew the Comanche were coming, which is why it’s often referred to as a “Comanche Moon.”
Rumors, he said, began to spread, whisperings of people working with the Indians, buying things they stole and of people not liking slaves living in the area. But the reality is much darker, according to descendants of the farmers.
Coleen Clark Cari is one of those descendants. Her great-great-grandfather, Nathaniel Clark, was a victim of the vigilante mob. She said that when Texas decided to leave the Union and become a Confederate state in 1861, legislators passed the Conscription Act. The act stated that if a person owned slaves, the person didn’t have to send his 18-year-old son to fight for the Confederacy.
Like the other 149 farmers, Cari’s great-great-grandfather didn’t own slaves to work his farm, and he needed his 18-year-old son to stay and help him. He began meeting with his neighbors in secret to figure out a way to save their boys from the most violent war ever to take place on U.S. soil.
But rumors have a way of fueling the fire, and a mob soon formed and began arresting people. They carted them off to an empty general store in Gainesville to try them in a “citizen’s court” of their peers, many of whom were slaveholders. Seven people were quickly convicted and sentenced to death by hanging.
A local slave, Bob Scott, drove the “hanging wagon” that took the men to the hanging tree on California Street where it crossed Pecan Creek. He’d park the wagon underneath the hanging branch, wait for the executioner to slip the noose around the victim’s neck, and then he’d guide the wagon out from under the doomed farmer.
“If you were smart, you’d jump hard, [which would break your neck quickly],” McCaslin told the crowd. “If you weren’t [smart enough to do that], it could take up to 20 minutes to strangle [you].”
After the seven men were hanged, the jury changed the number of votes needed for a guilty verdict, and no one else was convicted. They planned to hold the men for a week and release them to their families, and then the Confederate officers arrived.
The Confederate officers heard the jury was planning not to hang any more people and demanded to see the list of people being tried. They picked 14 men, one of whom was Clark — who had already been acquitted — took them out of the store and hanged them over a two-day period.
Scott drove the hanging wagon, only this time taking them two by two to the hanging tree.
Clark’s son, James, however, had already been sent off to fight for the Confederacy when his father was hanged. After receiving news of his father’s death, James switched sides and fought for the Union, according to his great granddaughter.
People in Gainesville thought the rest of the men would be released, but it didn’t work out. In the middle of the week, someone assassinated Col. William C. Young, who supervised the citizen’s court, according to the Texas State Historical Society.
Fourteen more men faced a quick trial and a slow death. Two other men were shot trying to escape their fates at the end of a hangman’s noose.
White crosses
In 2007, Leon Russell and his wife, Jean, began making white crosses to place under the great hanging tree in Gainesville.
Russell grew up east of Gainesville, but he’d never heard about “The Great Hanging at Gainesville, Texas, October 1862.” He was at a dinner party when he heard about the event. It soon became a passion as he researched and read about what many considered to be an unlawful hanging.
He contacted the Gainesville City Council and asked if he could place the white crosses under the great hanging tree as a memorial to the farmers.
Nearly a decade earlier, in 1999, the City Council had planned to create a memorial for the fallen farmers. Former Mayor Margaret Hayes, also a local historian, had formed a committee to create a $200,000 monument that told the story of the Great Hanging.
Architects created elaborate designs for the memorial, according to Coleen Clark Cari, who’s also the secretary and treasurer of The Great Hanging Tree Memorial Society. They worked on the memorial for two years, but Hayes was unable to raise the rest of the money needed.
Russell received approval from the City Council, and he and his wife began placing the grave markers underneath the Great Hanging tree. They’ve been doing it every year since 2008, and they’re just one of the many reasons The Great Hanging Memorial has finally happened with the creation of two monuments to remember the farmers who died trying to protect their children.
Cari said that Russell will be attending the dedication ceremony today. There will be a program called “October Mourning” at the First State Bank Center for the Performing Arts prior to the monument dedication ceremony at 1 p.m.
Anyone having knowledge of descendants of the Great Hanging is encouraged to contact the foundation at 817-999-9551.
