in
Cooke County, Texas Cooke County, located in the region of
North Texas and along the border with the U.S. State of
Oklahoma, was organized in 1848. Its seat,
Gainesville, was founded in 1850 and became the
county seat on 26 January 1854. Colonization of North Texas began in 1841, when William S. Peters and a group of Anglo-American investors opened an
empresario contract with the
Republic of Texas. Settlement was slow and, like in most of the
Antebellum South, marked by violent
vigilantism. In what became known as the Hedgcoxe War, colonists dissatisfied with Peters expelled his agent, Henry O. Hedgcoxe, in July 1852. Nearly two-thirds of the 421,294 free citizens of Texas, as counted in the
1860 Census, were born outside of Texas. The majority of Texans came from the
Upper South, but slaveholding
Lower Southerners were pre-eminent and disproportionately represented in Texas's government. The production of
cotton, which had exploded over seven-fold in Texas over the 1850s, made enslavers rich and connected the state's leaders to the future
Confederacy. Cooke County had a similar transition of power, while its population remained overwhelmingly non-enslaving. By 1860, only 10.9% of Cooke County households enslaved people. Among them were the county's
chief justice,
sheriff, and three of the four
county commissioners. Other important enslavers were Daniel Montague and
James G. Bourland, a former Texas state senator, and
James W. Throckmorton, a member of the Texas Legislature who was central to the settlement with Peters in 1853. Enslavers also controlled the volunteer state militias and often led them on expeditions against nearby
Native Americans raiding Cooke and other North Texas counties. Extralegal violence against Natives, suspected white collaborators, and
abolitionists was commonplace and cyclical. New arrivals from the Butterfield Overland route were abolitionists or suspected of abolitionism. Among the former were Methodist preachers who vigilantes violently repressed. When a series of fires caused significant damage to North Texas, tensions flared and then exploded into violence that resulted in three slaves hanged in Dallas, a Methodist minister by the name of
Anthony Bewley lynched, a hundred others whipped, and many free Northern Texans who had not already murdered or chased out of Texas by vigilantes. Despite growing
secessionism in Texas, Cooke County increasingly cast its lot against the incumbent
Southern Democrats. Nearby U.S. Army forts, which did business with North Texan enslavers, protected against Native American raids. Cooke County residents, furthermore, did not have an economic dependence on slavery and were unwilling to sacrifice their security to defend it. In the
1859 gubernatorial elections, 73% of Cooke County residents voted for Unionist
Sam Houston, who downplayed the fires and posed himself as a moderate against Democrat
Hardin Runnels, whose border security policies Houston decried as a failure. As in the rest of the
antebellum South, however,
John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry and the
election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States eliminated backlash against secession in Texas. In North Texas, enslavers began holding secessionist rallies in late 1860, though the sentiment was not unanimous in Cooke County nor the governments of Texas and the United States. The January 1861 session of the Texas Legislature overwhelmingly voted in favor of secession, to which Throckmorton was a leading opponent. A referendum, marred with secessionist violence and intimidation, was held in February; 61% of Cooke County votes were for staying in the United States, making it one of 18 of 122 Texas counties to vote against secession. Texas seceded from the United States on 4 March 1861. When Governor Sam Houston refused to pledge allegiance to the
Confederate States of America, he was deposed and replaced by the Lieutenant Governor
Edward Clark. With secession, North Texans left the state by the hundreds for free soil. This exodus gave Confederate officials and supporters the false belief that opposition to secession in North Texas had "vanished", as was reported in
The Times-Picayune, in
New Orleans. Discontent with the Confederacy had grown in the region with the arrival of refugees from other areas of the Confederacy. Many of these were men fleeing conscription and thereby contributing to a feeling of cynicism and suspicion settling over North Texas. Many more were enslaved people, whose enslavers only made up a third of the free refugees. Confederate policies exacerbated that discontent. The Sequestration Act of 1861 called for the seizure and sale of the property of "alien enemies" and those who aided them. This was to fund the Richmond government, but the
lion's share of procured funds in North Texas were absorbed by the local authorities. War taxes — in effect a year before they were law in the Confederacy — and
impressment of local firearms and men were hated, but the most offensive was conscription, passed on 16 April 1862. In April, 30 men of Cooke County formed a Union League and signed a petition to Richmond objecting to the government's policy of exempting large enslavers from the draft. A "Peace Party" was still active, although the state had joined the Confederacy. Its members pledged to resist Confederate conscription. Area enslavers claimed to fear that the group was colluding with pro-U.S. forces from out of state and notified local authorities about the incidents. ==Trials, executions, and lynchings==