In what may have been the single largest outbreak of vigilante violence in American history, forty suspected Unionists were hanged at Gainesville, Texas, in October 1862. Civil War tensions had been running high. The Cooke County community located just across the Red River from Indian Territory was split between natives of the Deep South who often supported the Confederacy and natives of the Upper South and Midwest who were sometimes indifferent or hostile to it. When active resistance to conscription into the Confederate army combined with long-running rumors of an invasion of North Texas by Kansas Jayhawkers and their Indian allies, many of the former decided action must be taken.