Panic, Fires, and Conspiracy Theories: Texas in 1860 (January 7, 2026)

by Scott Sosebee

I have heard as a common refrain among friends, family, acquaintances, and others that we are living in the most “divisive time in our history.” I will not argue that we are not a divided nation and the partisan, demographic, class, and even dissection based on not much more than where we live contains some of the most vigorous rancor any of us have ever seen. However, I will argue when I hear that it is the “worst we have ever seen,” because even today’s discord does not approach the sheer animosity of the rhetoric, actions, and eventual actual disunion that took place in 1860. The United States, in 1860, was truly a divided nation, and the drive toward disunion came from one central issue: the morality, efficacy, and value of continuing the practice of human bondage. Yes, there are current campaigns, writing, and even political movements designed to discredit such a notion, but the historical record—based on documents, speeches, and political action at the time—is clear: the regions were splitting apart over that one central issue.

Texas, as a slave-holding state that in 1860 contained about 200,000 enslaved people, was not immune to the bitterness that gripped the nation. Texas “fireaters,” led by men such as Louis Wigfall, had begun to openly advocate for secession from the Union as early as 1850 if the United States Congress did not legislatively affirm a state’s right to continue legal slavery. Wigfall and his ilk openly and vigorously made that position clear, even if some others (but not Wigfall, for sure) cloaked such a desire in more benign language. The constant tension over the direction of the nation led to predictable results. When passions are aroused nefarious intentions are often seen within events that in “normal times” are typically seen as mundane. Such a phenomenon happened in Texas in 1860. Spurred on by John Brown’s attempt to foment a slave rebellion in Virginia in 1859, combined with the bellicose talk of the “fireaters” and a debilitating drought, fires that would have been the normal occurrences of a hot, dry Texas summer were attributed to “slave insurrection,” which in turn led to what some historians have called the “Texas Troubles of 1860.”

Texas’ weather has always had its extremes, and in 1860 Texas was in the midst of a what would be a terrible three-year drought. For a state that depended on agriculture for its livelihood, a drought can be an agonizing turn of events. Rivers were reduced to trickles, reliable creeks dried wholly up, and water wells sputtered and yielded none of their life-giving produce. North-central and East Texas were hit particularly hard as temperatures from June through August climbed above a hundred degrees for days on end. One of the most diabolical results of such conditions in the mid nineteenth-century was fires. Texas cities and towns, with their largely wooden buildings, were tinderboxes just waiting for a spark. Such sparks came in the summer of 1860. The then small town of Dallas had a fire burn its central district on July 8. Shortly thereafter, similar fires broke out in Pilot Point and Denton. In Henderson, in East Texas, a fire that began on August 5 consumed almost the entire business district of the town. Other Texas cities had comparable fires during that hot summer, likely caused not only by the hot and dry conditions, but the presence of volatile phosphorous matches.

Those who lived in the towns of the mid-nineteenth century rightly feared such conflagrations. Fire was always a danger with devastating results. For example, Nacogdoches suffered terribly from three fires in the 1800s. However, the tensions and propaganda of the time in 1860 produced another result—the blaming of the fires on abolitionists or slave revolts. As the passion over the slavery issue grew in importance through the 1850s, so did the oppression and persecution of any person or group who did not “toe the line” when it came to the southern consensus on slavery. In Dallas, in 1858, two Methodist ministers were seized and publicly whipped because they had dared to speak against the institution. Vigilance committees in a number of towns threatened anyone who publicly disagreed with the practice, often visiting the offenders in the dead of night for added intimidation. It was not just Texas’ wooden buildings that were poised to burn that summer.

Media and authority figures often fuel such concerns, and that also happened in 1860. Dallas Herald editor Charles Pryor, a committed fireater,, sent a letter to a number of editors at other Texas papers in which he accused abolitionists—of which there were actually a scarce few in Texas—of fomenting a plot to “burn the state down” and began “a slave rebellion.” He alleged that there were secret “agents” in each North Texas town who were not only looking to burn towns but also “poison” their fellow citizens—all in the name of ending slavery. The other editors picked up on his theme and in Houston, Austin, and San Antonio papers, among others, editors wrote blistering editorials not only blaming abolitionists but calling for revenge.

The “revenge” was swift and took odious forms. Vigilance committees in almost every county took to patrols and vowed to “hang every man who does not live above suspicion” wrote one committee member from Fort Worth. The vigilance patrols identified so-called suspicious slaves and targeted them. Three enslaved men were hung extrajudicially in Dallas. Many others were given terrible whippings. Other hangings and violence were reported in Austin, San Antonio, Crockett, and Henderson as well as other Texas cities. Anyone accused of being an abolitionist was “encouraged” to leave the state, and most did.

The violence and paranoia of the “Troubles” did have its intended affect. Although Texas was certainly a committed slave-holding state, the sentiment around potential secession was more muted; the leading politician in the state, Sam Houston, was very vocal in his opposition to secession. Another, John H. Reagan, also publicly voiced his concern about taking that step. However, such sentiment began to change with that summer of 1860, so much so that a majority of Texans moved over to the side of secession by the time of the seminal election of November 1860. When Abraham Lincoln was elected, southern states began to make good on their promise to secede, and in February 1861 Texas did just that, in no small measure due to what had happened in the summer of 1860.

The East Texas Historical Association provides this column as a public service. Scott Sosebee the Executive Director of the Association and can be contacted at sosebeem@sfasu.edu or via www.easttexashistorical.org.