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Background

 * Paragraph 1 - Texas and Cooke County

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 January 26, 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. The arrival in Gainesville in 1858 of the Butterfield Overland mail route, following a trail surveyed by U.S. Army Captain Randolph B. Marcy in 1849, brought a rapid rise in Cooke County's population from 220 people in 1850 to 3,760 in 1860. Most of these settlers were homesteaders from the Midwest or Upper South who did not own slaves. Cooke County, as in the rest of Texas, was by 1860 dominated politically, economically, and socially by slave-owning Lower Southerners, of which there 74 households – 10.9% of households – in Cooke County. By 1861, three of the county's commissioners, its chief justice, and its sheriff were slaveholders.


 * Paragraph 2 - Evil Land, Violent Land

Cooke County was occasionally raided by the Comanche and Kiowa peoples, despite the protection of nearby US Army forts (first established in 1847) and volunteer militias. These militias were also led by local slaveholders, among them Bourland, and engaged in cyclical violence with nearby native peoples.

Vigilante violence against migrants was common in North Texas as locals feared abolitionists, especially in the wake of the Bleeding Kansas conflict.

Three events caused everybody to lose their Goddamn minds. The first was John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, in October 1859. The second was the fires and subsequent hysteria of the Texas Troubles, in July 1860. The third was the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States later that year.

Matters were not helped by John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry in October 1859 or a string of damaging fires across North Texas the next year (July 1860). Abolitionists were suspected of starting the fires, and to prosecute their hysteria, Texans formed vigilance committees. By September, at least thirty people had been lynched on suspicion of connection to the fires.


 * Paragraph 3 - Secession, Dissent, Descent

By 1860, Most Texans had come from the Upper South, but political and economic dominance was held by slave-owning Lower Southerners. They were ascendant in the 1850s thanks to the cultivation of cotton. That very decade, Texas's production of cotton increased more than sevenfold. This tied Texas's leadership very closely to the Lower South.

In the 1859 gubernatorial election, 73% of Cooke County's residents voted for pro-Union candidate Sam Houston.

The counties of North Texas voted against secession.

61% of Cooke County residents voted to remain in the Union in Texas's 1861 referendum on secession.

Almost 75% of votes cast in Texas for the secession referendum were in favor. Only 18 of Texas's 122 counties voted against secession.

The Confederate government aggravated their already poor relations with North Texans when it enacted the conscription law of early 1862. And then again when it sent North Texas draftees to the eastern theater after promising not to.

Trials and executions
Bourland was made the provost marshal of North Texas by the Confederate government.

Young was ambushed and shot to death by parties unknown while hunting on 16 October. 19 more people were hung in Gainesville to avenge his murder, as if they had anything to do with it.

40 people were hung at Gainesville, making it the largest mass hanging in American history.

Reactions
The hangings were applauded in contemporary Texan newspapers.

Legacy
Bourland was pardoned by the President of the United States and never punished for his involvement in the Great Hanging, despite accusations of war crimes even during the Civil War.