Content area
Full Text
Texas Terror: The Slave Insurrection Panic of 1860 and the Secession of the Lower South. By Donald E. Reynolds. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007. xiv, 237 pp. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-3283-8.)
In the summer of 1860 a series of mysterious fires in Dallas and other north Texas towns destroyed dozens of buildings. The fires were probably caused by the spontaneous ignition of a new type of phosphorous match, but within a week reports circulated, primarily through Texas newspapers, that the fires were set by slaves as part of a massive plot engineered by northern abolitionists active in Texas. Texas newspaper editors, especially Charles Pryor of the Dallas Herald, fanned fears of mass murder and a slave insurrection. Suspicion was immediately focused on all northerners in...