They Hanged Our Ancestors For Resisting Treason. We Should Go Back to Our Roots.

In the first cool days of October 1862, Texas state troops rode through Cooke County and arrested more than 150 of their own neighbors. Most were farmers, working land along the creeks and the prairie, raising corn and cattle, owning no human beings. Within days a court of twelve men sat down in Gainesville to decide which of them would live.

Seven of those twelve owned slaves. Not one of the accused did. The two men who organized the affair, Col. James G. Bourland and Col. William C. Young, between them held close to a quarter of every enslaved person in the county. The court convicted by simple majority vote. It condemned seven prominent Unionists to hang. Then the mob outside grew impatient and took fourteen more. When Young turned up dead, nineteen additional men were hauled back, tried again, and hanged. Forty men swung from the trees that month. Two more were shot trying to run.

The newspapers cheered. Gov. Francis Lubbock praised the militia commander. The legislature paid the soldiers' expenses. A mob with paperwork is still a mob, and this one carried the full blessing of the state of Texas.

We keep telling this story because the men who died in it were us. Not in some soft figurative way. They were Cooke County, the actual majority of it, and the people who hanged them were the wealthy few.

Eight months before the rope, in February 1861, this county voted on whether Texas should leave the Union. It voted no, 221 against secession to 137 for, better than six in ten telling the planters down in Austin to keep us in the United States. Two years earlier, in the 1859 governor's race, roughly 73 percent of Cooke County backed Sam Houston, the old Unionist, over Hardin Runnels, the Democrat who wanted to reopen the African slave trade and spoke openly of leaving the Union. North Texas watched the secession fever burn across the South and, county after county, said no.

Be honest about why, because the honesty is the whole strength of the thing. Our ancestors were no band of abolition crusaders, and we do them no favors pretending they were. Houston himself owned slaves. The Texas State Historical Association says plainly that few of the hanged had actually conspired against the Confederacy and that many were innocent of the abolitionist sympathies pinned on them. What they shared was simpler, and harder for the powerful to forgive. By 1860 fewer than eleven percent of households here owned anyone. Seventy-four families held all 369 of the county's slaves, and those were the families that ran the place: the chief justice, the sheriff, three of the four county commissioners, men like Daniel Montague and the former state senator Bourland and the legislator James Throckmorton. Slavery was the fortune of the few. It was never the livelihood of the many.

There was hard practicality in it too. Nearby U.S. Army forts were a real part of frontier security, and the soldiers who manned them did business with the same North Texas enslavers. A farmer out here measured safety by whether the army stayed, not by whether South Carolina got its way. Many residents were unwilling to risk losing that protection for a slaveholders' rebellion, and secession threatened to pull it and hand us a war on two fronts while the men who started it sat safe behind their own exemptions.

So when the Confederacy passed its conscription act in April 1862 and wrote in a draft exemption for large slaveholders, thirty men here signed a petition and mailed it to Richmond. Read that slowly. Men with no slaves were being asked to send their sons to die for a Confederacy that excused the slaveholders from the same burden. A rich man's war and a poor man's fight, they understood it, before the phrase got famous. They declined, and they organized for common defense against frontier raids and against the draft. For that, the people who profited from slavery called them traitors and strung them up.

Look hard at that arrangement, because it is the root of this county. The wealthy wrapped their own property interest in the flag of region and race, declared anyone who questioned it an enemy of the people, and used the machinery of the state to crush dissent. Texas's own declaration of causes that winter said the quiet part out loud, defending the state as a slaveholding commonwealth and rejecting any notion of equality across the color line. That was the official creed. Cooke County had voted against it, and it would be punished for it.

Now consider what passes for our inheritance today. Call yourself a conservative in 2026 and too many people hear grievance and Confederate nostalgia, men who wave the flag of the very government that hanged our great-great-grandfathers. That is not our lineage. Our lineage stood at the other end of the rope. The left does not get to define conservatism as racism and secession. But Republicans should not hand their opponents evidence for that charge and then complain about the label.

None of which makes the modern Democratic Party our home. It plainly is not. Its instincts on faith and family, on how much of a man's life the government should run, cut against the grain of this place and always have. The farmer who refused to be conscripted into someone else's war would not recognize a party that wants to conscript his paycheck into someone else's program.

But he would recognize, with a cold and familiar eye, the conservatism now being sold to us. The tribalism that asks which side you are on before it asks whether you are right. The nationalism that mistakes loyalty to the country for loyalty to whoever holds the gavel. The appetite for the next war. The flattening of every hard question into a slogan you can shout across a fence. Our ancestors were marched to a tree by men every bit that sure of themselves.

Going back to our roots does not mean switching teams. It means remembering that the people who built this county distrusted concentrated power whether it came dressed in a uniform or a frock coat, refused to die for the comfort of the rich, and would not be told that disagreement was treason. We can want a secure border without turning every stranger into a prop. We can honor a soldier without cheering every war fever that comes across the television. We can defend local control without pretending county pride licenses anyone to revive the racial hierarchy our anti-secession ancestors refused to die for.

A county that tells the truth has to hold all of it at once. Not every ancestor here deserves admiration. Some held people in bondage. Some sat on that jury. Some cheered the hangings. But a clean line runs through the dark: Cooke County had men who refused secession, refused slave-power politics, and paid for it with their lives. Their memory should make us harder to manipulate.

The county still carries the names of the men who did the hanging. Bourland, Montague, Throckmorton sit on our maps and in our records, solid as the day they were carved. The forty who died that October left almost nothing, no monument their killers would permit, barely a list of names. Drive down toward the creek some evening, where it happened, and stand there a minute. Then ask which of those men you actually come from — and which party today would have handed you the rope.