Texas Terror: The Slave Insurrection Panic of 1860 and the
Secession of the Lower South
By Donald E. Reynolds

Illustrated, bibliography, index, 264 pages, 2007. Louisiana State University Press, P.O. Box 25053, Baton Rouge, LA 70894-5053, $45 plus shipping.

Reviewer: C. Michael Harrington
C. Michael Harrington is a member of the Houston Civil War Round Table and Civil War Aficionados. He has written several articles on South Carolina Confederates. A practicing lawyer, he has degrees in economics from Yale and Cambridge and a law degree from Harvard.

Review:
Summer weather in North Texas can be brutally hot, and Sunday, July 8, 1860, was a “scorcher” even by the elevated standards of the area, with thermometer readings in Dallas reaching 110 degrees. A fire that broke out in the city that afternoon eventually consumed the whole of the business section. Within the next day or so, more than a dozen other fires were reported within a 75-mile radius of Dallas.

Initially, arson was not suspected, and the fires were attributed mostly to the spontaneous combustion of newfangled, unstable phosphorus “prairie” matches.

A few days later, however, the young, pro-secessionist editor of the Dallas Herald, Charles Pryor, wrote letters to editors of several other Texas newspapers alleging that the fires were the handiwork of a widespread abolitionist conspiracy, hell bent on laying waste to North Texas via fire and strychnine in order to free the region’s slaves.

Northern Methodist preachers, Pryor maintained, had recruited gullible slaves to commit arson, murder and general mayhem in North Texas. Texans, like other Southerners, were already on edge as a result of John Brown’s abortive raid on Harpers Ferry the previous fall.

Pryor’s allegations, which were published uncritically in many Texas and other Southern newspapers, touched off a slave insurrection panic that quickly spread across the Lone Star State and beyond its borders into other slave states.

In his book Texas Terror, Donald Reynolds, a retired history professor, presents a thorough analysis of the “Texas Troubles,” as the North Texas fires, rumored mass poisonings and associated mischief came to be called.

Reynolds makes a compelling case that the fires resulted largely from the chemically unstable prairie matches, stored in unsafe conditions and ignited by extreme heat. Texans of the day, however, interpreted the fires as deliberate and reacted violently against those they suspected as complicit in the conflagrations.

Three luckless black men suspected of starting the fire in Dallas were summarily hanged. Vigilance committees quickly formed across Texas to investigate the Texas Troubles and to punish suspected miscreants. Slaves were coerced into outlandish confessions of arson and other imaginary crimes.

In one of the ugliest examples of the breakdown of law and order touched off by the Texas Troubles, in early September 1860 vigilantes kidnapped a minister in Missouri who was wrongfully suspected of inciting North Texas slaves to violence and transported him back to Forth Worth to face drumhead justice.

As the summer of 1860 turned to fall, secessionist newspapermen and politicians continued to cite the Texas Troubles as evidence of an abolitionist plot against the South inspired by Republican Party principles, notwithstanding the absence of real supporting evidence.

Besides exploding the myth of the Texas slave insurrection conspiracy of 1860, Reynolds probes the effects that the resulting panic had on conditioning secession in Texas and other states within the Lower South, and he posits that the panic played a significant role in the secession of several of these states.

He writes that, had there been no slave panic in 1860, “it is likely that the course of secession at least would have been altered, although the end result might have been the same.” More specifically, Reynolds theorizes that the panic was instrumental in the secession of all of the Lower South states save South Carolina, Mississippi and Florida.

Had the other Cotton States not joined with these three non-contiguous states, Reynolds suggests that the secession movement might have aborted short of war.

Counterfactual history admits of few hard and fast conclusions, but Reynolds at least makes an interesting argument for his views about the impact of the Texas Troubles on the course of secession in the Lower South. 

Readers interested in this aspect of the secession movement, as well as those intrigued by studies of mass hysteria, will enjoy Texas Terror, which is well written, artfully edited (with helpful footnotes placed at the bottoms of the book’s pages) and masterfully researched. 

This reviewer’s only criticism is that a basic map of Texas would have helped readers locate some of the more obscure Texas towns mentioned in the text.