This ending is stronger.
In a
new instruction, Amazon suggests that a reviewer say what he will use a book
for. Well, I am a Melville biographer, not a student of Civil War history, but
I have been looking at my family history (of which I was totally ignorant) in
relation to episodes of Southern history from the 1600s on. I have Texas
connections. My first five years were in Escobas, Texas, on the Rio Grande, and
from 1957-1959 I was the night telegrapher on the Kansas City Southern Railway
in Port Arthur. Many of my cousins came to Texas early and played significant
roles there. Jim Bowie is a Maryland Pottenger cousin two ways, for example,
and the McGehee, Sparks, Sims, Dougherty, Hills, and other cousins had
interesting lives in Texas starting before there was a Republic. Bowie and more
distant cousins were at the Alamo. Others were on the Runaway Scrape and proved
their swimming skills at San Jacinto, and a Bell cousin published a book about
his imprisonment after he survived the disastrous Mier expedition. Another
Texan cousin is Henry Truman Hill (the middle name traces back to a Maryland
ancestor who is also an ancestor of Harry S. Truman).
I began checking on Henry Truman Hill because the same full ancestral name was
used by one of my direct ancestors who was an Alabama man a generation older
than his Texas cousin, but both of them Methodist circuit riders. The Texas HTH
as a former Texas Ranger is buried in Center Point Cemetery, where three dozen
Rangers went after their deaths. From Henry Truman Hill I was led to his
father, Aaron Mason Hill, District Clerk (that is, County Clerk) for Cooke
County, Texas, during one of the episodes of Southern history I had never heard
of, the Great Hangings in Gainesville in 1862. Over forty Union men were hanged
after “trial” and various other men on both sides (Union and Confederate) were
hanged or shot.
So, Amazon, I am using this book, The Great Hanging at Gainesville, 1862, to
understand the role Cousin Aaron Hill played in the tragic events. What I have
found, indeed, is not pretty. The villains in most depictions of the Great
Hangings start with the Provost Marshal for North-central Texas, James G.
Bourland, like Col. William Young, the owner of many slaves. Although the
majority of people in Cooke County opposed secession, the rich minority were
the ones in power. My cousin Robert C. Carpenter, in Gaston County, North
Carolina, in the Civil War (2016) shows very clearly that a majority in North
Carolina were opposed to secession but pushed into war by big slaveholders who
were, of course, also high office-holders. That is what happened here.
Bourland already had a connection with the Hill family, for the only two year
period for Henry Truman Hill to have been a Texas Ranger was before the war,
since he was a Confederate soldier during the war, and he would have served as
Ranger under Bourland. No wonder in 1862 Bourland appointed Aaron Hill, the
District Clerk (that is, County Clerk), to be one of five men to chose the
twelve jurors to try Union sympathizers. But Cousin Aaron’s role did not end
with his helping to choose twelve men. During the trials he and perhaps others
of the original five were the keepers of records of the trials, the
interrogators, and the ones who presumably wrote down (on the fly) the
testimony of a few witnesses and confessions of many Union men.
This is what has cost me a few weeks already: worrying about the presumed
records of the trials, what McCaslin in the introduction calls the “vigilante
court records.” The earliest important historian of the hangings was Thomas
Barrett, an unwilling member of the jury who in 1885 published a pamphlet
exonerating himself from the general mistaken public opinion that he had been a
rabid advocate of the hangings. The problem for us is that he was so anxious to
be inoffensive in his story that he left out almost all names. Even when once
he says he is going to depart from his policy and name a name, I can’t see that
he does. He talks a good deal about the confessions of the arrested men and
what he says goes against what one would expect. There was a massive Union plot
to kill rebels, Barrett believed, for he heard the imprisoned men lay out a
great plan of a Union uprising that would involve the massacre of even women
and children. He does not say who confessed this, but it was apparently Richard
N. Martin, according to George Washington Diamond, whose brother, James J.
Diamond, had been one of the investigators of the Union plot. Such a
confession, obtained as far as we know without torture other than fear of
hanging, I find absolutely baffling. Union men plotted to kill women and
children? Barrett thought so.
G. W. Diamond was the author of the other long account besides Barrett’s. He
was not a witness, but, according to family history, after the war he was
assigned the task of writing up the history of the “Peace Party Plot” and given
custody of the “original records of the court.” Unlike Barrett, Diamond named
names. These records included long confessions in court and (in the case of
Richard N. Martin, on the scaffold).
How any one of the 5 men appointed by Bourland could have written down the
formal accounts which Diamond copied out is a mystery to me—and of course the
way they are presented in the first publication, in 1963, emphasizes their
formal perfection. Perhaps my cousin Aaron, the County Clerk, was the man or
one of the men in charge of making on the spot formal records and was a
speed-writer. I am persuaded that the five men did make some formal records
because Barrett says that before the jurors would vote on the fate of a man,
the testimony against the men which had been “all written down” was read to
them. Presumably this testimony would have included the confessions recorded in
detail by Diamond in his account which was left in the possession of his family
and not published until 1963.
Now, the family in 1963 did not have the court records which had been entrusted
to Diamond. Where were they? This is from the footnote on page 7 of McCaslin’s
Tainted Breeze: “In 1925 Rex Strickland, a historian, said that “the records of
the Citizens Court were in the possession of Adam Hornback, a resident of
Grayson County. This is the last known location of these materials.” McCaslin
does not elaborate. Have Texas historians hounded Hornback’s descendants and
crawled into their corn-bins and attics? How could they not have kept up the
search? The original records would allow us to identify the scribe. Was he, in
fact, Cousin Aaron? And did the original records show that Diamond was
accurately transcribing them? How much regularizing did he do and how much more
did the 1963 editors do? Did the editors in 1963 create the polished official
look of the documents, perhaps out of a respect for regularizing? We have to be
at least a little skeptical about the records as known only through Diamond’s
partial transcription and the editorial work of the 1963 publication. But for
all our wariness, Barrett makes it clear that he heard chilling confessions.
How I wish McCaslin in this book had described the search Texas historians made
for the papers Hornbeck supposedly possessed!
How I wish McCaslin in this book had included some of the early newspaper
accounts of the hangings, particularly as Southern newspaper editors began to
understand some details of what had happened. Anything based on observation or
reliable report might be valuable. Also, much later newspaper reports, even
reports in the 1900s, contain a few new bits of testimony which would have been
good to have here.
I wish McCaslin had included a fairly reliable list of murdered men and which
families were able to claim and bury the bodies.
How I wish someone would quote the comment that writers repeatedly say that E.
Junius Foster wrote in his Sherman newspaper, that the shooting of Col. William
Young was the best thing that could have happened. Maybe he said that or
something like that, but it would be nice to see the actual newspaper or else
to admit that we have heard that this is what Young’s son believed Foster had
said. People coming cold to this story need help with basics.
I wish McCaslin had included Susan Leffel’s 1869 letter to Governor Edmund
Davie.
I feel very strongly that McCaslin ought to have included the Special
Correspondent’s long 4 March 1894 article in the St. Louis Republic. Could
Texas historians not identify him? The Correspondent was not a witness, but
neither was G. W. Diamond. He had a copy of Barrett’s pamphlet, but he also
relied on “the statements made by old citizens.” He knew or at least observed
several players in the tragedy who were still alive, so that he could describe
them. His way of referring to his interlocutors 32 years on suggests that he
was a youngish man himself. He was apparently not a resident, but he walked
some of the terrain and knew where the bodies were buried, or where they were
dumped. The Special Correspondent ought to have been heard. For example, he
quotes an informant as telling him that Joe Carmichael was “a big strappin’
fellow, not afraid of the devil, and he cussed ’em to the last.” This belongs
in the record.
Another reason that the Special Correspondent’s letter ought to have been
printed here is that it evoked a response that historians have apparently
ignored. Catharine Marsh Kahn from Montrose, Missouri, wrote on 13 March a
letter the Republic printed on the 15th under the heading “THE GAINESVILLE
HANGING. Relatives of Dr. Childs Give Their Version of the Affair.” Mrs. Kahn
identified herself as a grandniece of the widow of Doctor Childs (who is here
called “Dr. F. C. Childs”—not Henry and not Chiles. Judging from 1850 and 1860
censuses, “Dr. Henry Childs” is the correct form.) Mrs. Kahn says: “Mrs. Dicey
Childs is living to-day, as are her five children [she might have said five of
her children, for she bore more than 5] and also several hundred of her
relatives. So that awful murder is not soon to be forgotten by one victim’s
friends.” She was blunt: “Aunt Dicey tells a different story from the writer in
last Sunday’s Republic. Those men were hanged because they were loyal to the
Union—simply that and nothing more. There was a farce trial for the first seven
or eight, and after that—nothing.” Kahn’s depicts Mrs. Childs as crawling out
of her bed of confinement, “scarcely able to walk,” but trudging with other
women all the way to Gainesville. I quote several horrific lines:
“When they reached the town other women were there before them, weeping,
screaming, and begging for the bodies of their loved ones, for they were dead
and had been buried some time. And some of the prominent men of the town—fiends
they were at the time—mounted horses, and with cattle whips, drove the women
before them from the town, saying they would not have them bawling around there.”
The "cattle whips" remind us of how little we have on record from the
losing side. Now, when you look at G. W. Diamond’s contempt for the weeping
women in the section on “Heavy Rain Fall,” you give some credence to Mrs. Kahn.
What Catharine Kahn wrote is a significant bit of testimony and should not have
been ignored. It and the other family testimony in online sites ought to be
included in any revision of the book.
And the bit about a little girl seeing her stepfather’s arm being carried
around Gainesville by a hog after rain washed bodies out of Peach Creek—that
ought to have been quoted. Just what do we know about how bodies were disposed
of?
Finally, I find it very disappointing that this volume has no index. Readers
need one. This is a frustratingly incomplete book.
Please,
members of the Texas State Historical Association, think about reissuing this
book with a supplement that answers such questions as those I have raised and
includes both 1894 pieces and other new material, even offhand bits of memory
in late newspaper articles. New blogs are bringing forth significant comments
from remote descendants. Such new information is hard to reconcile with the
official-looking, polished records of the vigilante court as they are presented
here in this book. I am tormented by the image of the cattle whips wielded
against weeping women by fiendish horsemen. We need to hear the
"bawling" of the widows before we can begin to lay this story to
rest.
