[Little Rock] Old-Line Democrat, August 16, 1860
Great excitement has been caused in Texas, and is spreading throughout the Southern States generally, arising out of a series of conflagrations that have taken place in a portion of that State, and that are properly attributed to abolition incendiaries. When the news of these destructive fires was transmitted over the telegraph it was received with a considerable degree of incredulity, and was pretty generally regarded as a political invention, resorted to for the purpose of inflaming to a more virulent point the passions of the Southern people against their Northern brethren. In election times ordinary events are sometimes taken advantage of, and exaggerated and distorted to suit particular views; and it was supposed that one or two accidental fires in Texas were thus seized upon to give coloring for the charge that abolition emissaries had been sent into that region to seduce slaves to apply the torch to the property of their masters. It appears, however, that whatever may have been the origin of these fires—whether they occurred through accident or design—they have been very extensive, very destructive, and remarkably coincident in point of time and locality. We publish to-day an extract from one of the New Orleans papers, giving some details on the subject, and we find that on one day (July 8) fires occurred at the following points in Texas
Dallas $300,000
Denton 60,000
Pilot Point 60,000
Milford 100,000
Black Jack Grove, 30,000
Ladonia 25,000
Millwood, 10,000
Near Dallas 5,000
At Waxahachi and at Austin, extinguished without loss.
The fact of these conflagrations taking place simultaneously, and without any accidental cause, so far as known, gives some degree of plausibility to the idea that they were the work of incendiaries, of slaves who were incited by abolitionists of the John Brown school. It is known that the old leader of the Harper’s Ferry insurrection had entertained notions of inaugurating similar movements in several of the cotton States; and therefore there is not so much improbability in the supposition that abolitionist emissaries would penetrate into Texas as might at first appear. It may be that slaves have been tampered with by intermeddling abolitionists, and that, in their newly acquired notions, they may have got the idea that one mode of obtaining their freedom, or at least of obtaining revenge, was to inaugurate an indiscriminate course of incendiarism.
At all events, one thing appears quite certain, that these destructive fires have occurred, and have excited to an alarming extent the feeling of the people of Texas, and of the South generally, against the abolitionism of the North.