Customer Reviews

Tainted Breeze: The Great Hanging at Gainesville, Texas, 1862

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When I was a young boy growing up in Oklahoma, I was told of my great-great grandfather being hung in Texas during the Civil War. I never knew much about the circumstances surrounding the event other than that, except that his name was Nathaniel Miles Clark, and that I was named for one of his sons, James Lemuel.

While looking up ancestors, I came across Mr. McCaslin's historical account about a mass hanging in Gainesville Texas in 1862. Believing that this could be an account of the event about which I had been told, I ordered the book, and read it through in one day. It was a most enlightening account.

Since then I have read accounts from other sources of the same events, but Mr. McCaslin's well documented study is the most complete and impartial account that I have read of the entire episode. Mr. McCaslin does much to reduce the historical obscurity of the circumstances surrounding the Great Gainesville Hangings, especially to the descendants of the victims of that episode, which by now must be a great number of people.

I would like to see a movie made based on this event.

Mr. McCaslin has opened the murky pages of the past with this outstanding accounting of the Hanging at Gainesville. Even today there are strong feelings on both sides regarding the right or wrong of the situation, although, there can never be any doubt that the system broke down badly. It is a image of controlled and ordered hysteria. I have no doubt that the Southern sympathizers felt justified in their actions. I also have no doubt that their actions was an abuse of power, regardless of how justified they felt.

His book has helped me reconstruct the events in the life of my ancestor, Alexander Boutwell, who was the executioner at the majority of the hangings.

Mr. McCaslin does an outstanding job portraying both sides without condoning the actions of either. His book, which is dog-eared and full of notes, holds a welcome spot in my library.

I found this book when I did a search for Gainesville, Texas. I have not completed reading the whole book yet but there is a lot of information here that I had hoped for. I was especially interested in this book as I was looking for more information on the "great hangings". My great-grandmother was interviewed by a newspaper in 1925 and spoke about the hangings and how my great-grandfather was asked to guard the prisoners. This gave me a more personal interest in the book. I would recommend this book to those interested in learning more about Gainesville and the Civil War.

I read this book as part of some background reading on Unionist dissent and Confederate disaffection in Texas during the Civil War era. I was only somewhat familiar with the Gainesville incident. If this book were just about that incident, it would be well worth the price. But the book is about SO MUCH more than that and that is what makes it all the more interesting and important. The scholarship is outstanding and the writing is lively...readers will learn about the Gainesville hanging, to be sure, but also about the history and "rubrics" - such as they are - of vigilantism...while more than 40 people were tragically murdered at Gainesville, it was amazing to read of hundreds more killed in lynchings in the years that followed and the completed lack of justice in bringing the people responsible for the Gainesville hangings to account, which was the most interesting - and maddening - part of the story. I do wish he would have addressed the situation in other parts of Texas, but that's just me. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!

This wonderful book gave so much information about the Civil War era in Texas as well as being informative about an incident which has very little written knowledge of. It was particularly interesting to me as one of the characters of this book was an ancestor of mine.

Books like this should be required reading for libertarians who think that if you just removed government from peoples' lives, that everything would just sort of work itself out for the best. This would also be good reading for any Southern apologists who would argue that the Confederacy just wanted to be left in peace and that the war was all about Yankee aggression.

The story of this book is what happens when central authority breaks down and people are left to their own devices. When people take the law into their own hands, they tend to do what furthers their own interests. In this case, the interests lay primarily with the Confederate sympathizers in the Gainesville region of Texas, who proceeded to take about 40 Unionists and execute them during October 1862. Not coincidentally, many of the Unionists and Confederates had other bones of contention between them, and these hangings settled a number of scores unrelated to Civil War itself. Some men faced reprisals, but in large part most of those who participated never were brought to any sort of justice.

This is a cautionary tale, especially in these times when civil liberties seem to discarded all too easily in favor of national security. The Unionists, though few had actually spoken out against the Confederacy (some were not even Unionists!), were charged with treason & conspiracy to insurrection. Under the guise of protecting the security of the region, the suspects were rushed to justice & summarily executed. These were all people, on both sides, who had been model citizens for the most part only a few years previously.

Events like this were not restricted to North Texas. Out in frontier communities, a lot of people took advantage of the breakdown of authority to settle scores with their enemies, often under the guise of protecting the security of their region. After reading a book such as this, one is left with a very unsettled view of man's capacity for lawlessness, even among the most respectable of citizens, if given a chance to break the law without consequence. It has happened before, and it could happen again.