Peterloo Massacre

“ With eyes riveted now to the massacre, I saw frantic women trodden down by men; huge clearings made by the shells and instantly filled up; house-fronts crushing horses and vehicles as they fell; fires bursting out on all sides, to devour what they listed, and terrified police struggling wildly and helplessly in the heart of the press. The roar of the guns was continuous, and every missile found its billet. Was I in Pandemonium? I saw Burnett, black with grime, hounding his comrades on to the slaughter. I heard the roar of Schwartz’s bombs, and the roar of the burning and falling houses. ”

“ From Deerfield and Schenectady to the Little Bighorn, our devoted bands have perished at the hands of the American Indian; and each dark day is suffered to rest as a mere tradition, buried in the half-forgotten folk-lore of its time and place. Why does the Fort Dearborn massacre, involving only a few score souls, hold a different rank in our hearts?
It is because the footsteps of millions are passing over the spot where it all happened; steamers are churning its peaceful waters; bells and steam-whistles are rending the air that bore away the sound of gun-shots, war-whoops and dying cries ”

“ With one deafening yell and impulse, the players rushed forward in a body, as if to regain it, but as they reached their women and entered the gateway, they threw down their wooden bats and grasping the shortened guns, tomahawks, and knives, the massacre commenced, and the bodies of the unsuspecting British soldiers soon lay strewn about, lifeless, horribly mangled, and scalpless. ”

“ One of the first deeds in this campaign, and the one that certainly first turned the tide and caused the pro-slavery ruffians to feel that they had need to look to their own safety, and would not be suffered with impunity to murder whom they chose and fire honest men's houses like fiends let loose, was the midnight massacre at Pottawatomie. Along a certain creek there lived five of these incendiaries and outrage-mongers who were specially notorious. ”

“ To our surprise and dismay we found that the massacre of Wednesday, which might have been explained though certainly not excused on the ground of excitement in the heat of battle, the flush of victory, and the knowledge of dead comrades 599mutilated, was being continued in cold blood now. Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday were spent by the soldiery in murder and pillage from dawn to dark, in mutilation, in every conceivable kind of nameless atrocity, until the town became a ghastly Inferno to be remembered with a fearsome shudder until one’s dying day. ”

“ I tell you, boys, we are going to see some fun right here, and the Colonel says it will begin to-morrow."
"The massacre?" asked all the boys at once.
"Yes, sir. We must have some wood, and about the time that the train and its escort get ready to march out, you will hear the war whoop."
"Well, let it come," said Perkins. "They will find that American soldiers are not the men to run just because they hear a whoop. We enlisted to fight, and now we are going to see what sort of a beginning we can make at it." ”

“ As to this massacre, God forbid that I should say a single word in defense of it! As a white man and a Christian, I feel it is an act of horrible atrocity; but it should not make such an impression upon your people, who make wars solely to obtain victims, whom they may sacrifice at the altars of their gods; and who, every year, slay in cold blood fully twenty-five thousand people who have done them no wrong. By the side of such horrible slaughter as this, the murder of six hundred, the other day, was but a drop in the ocean of blood annually shed here. ”

“ At the close of it, Tchaka ordered several men to be executed on the spot, and the cries became, if possible, more violent than ever. No further orders were needed; but, as if bent on convincing their chief of their extreme grief, the multitude commenced a general massacre—many of them received the blow of death while inflicting it on others, each taking the opportunity of revenging his injuries, real or imaginary. Those who could no more force tears from their eyes—those who were found near the river, panting for water—were beaten to death by others mad with excitement. ”

“ Immediately after the king and queen had left the Tuileries, the mob broke in at every avenue. A few hundred Swiss soldiers left there remained faithful to the king. The conflict was short—the massacre awful. The infuriated multitude rushed through the halls and the apartments of the spacious palace, murdering, without mercy and without distinction of age or sex, all the friends of the king whom they encountered. The mutilated bodies were thrown out of the windows to the mob which filled the garden and the court. The wretched inmates of the palace fled, pursued in every direction. ”

“ Not victory or defeat, not wounds or even death—nay, not old Time himself can clear a soldier from the terrible ordeal of the "Accounting Department." Poor Heald had evidently been asked: "Where is the money which was in your hands before the savages surrounded you, slaughtered your troops, wounded yourself and your wife, massacred the civilians under your care, tortured to death your wounded and burned your fort?" ”

“ The mere presence of white people seemed to infuriate them to frenzied acts, and the wonder is that the general massacre of the settlers did not begin at Peterson rather than at Okoboji.
As already noted there were at Peterson by February, 1857, the families of James Bicknell, Jacob Kirchner, and Ambrose S. Mead. Although the news of Indian depredations had reached these families before the coming of the Indians themselves, conditions were such that no steps could be taken to [Pg 89] offer resistance. The Bicknell cabin, being located the furthest to the south and west, was reached first. ”

“ The day which dawned so bright has dragged through its bloody hours and come to its dark and hideous close. The dead, men, women and children, are at peace. The wounded are suffering the torments of the pit, the rest are shuddering in the uncertainties that lie before them. ”

“ Drums beat and trumpets, and the guards every where spread, running up and down in the street. And I begun to have mighty apprehensions how things might be at home, and so was in mighty pain to get home, and that that encreased all is that we are in expectation, from common fame, this night, or to-morrow, to have a massacre, by the having so many fires one after another, as that in the City, and at same time begun in Westminster, by the Palace, but put out ”

“ The garrison of the bank saw many Europeans, hurrying, too late, to reach that shelter, murdered before their eyes. In the Levantine quarter, the cracking of pistols and the shouts of men showed that the work of massacre was proceeding there. Soon every door of the houses in the great square was forced in, and ere long great numbers of men, loaded with spoil of all kinds, staggered out. ”

“ Immediately the massacre commenced. Volley after volley was poured into the terrified crowd, pushing down and trampling on each other in their haste to reach the shelter of the prisons. Men were killed in the act of supplicating mercy, (p. 295) others were shot down while struggling to enter the prison doors. It was cold-blooded murder, and before all the prisoners could get within the walls, over sixty were killed or wounded. When the living had all escaped to a place of shelter, and the carnage was over, the prison yard presented a ghastly spectacle. ”

“ In this instance I dare say the cry of "Nous sommes trahis!" is not far from the truth. The unfortunate garrison were asleep when the troops entered, the sentinels having, as is alleged, fled, when they found the enemy was upon them. There were 800 men in the redoubt, and before they could prepare any effective resistance the massacre was effected. Now, after all this slaughter and capture of prisoners and guns, Moulin Saquet is again in the hands of the Insurgents. The Commune boasts that the National Guards attacked it with much dash, and re-took it from the troops of Versailles. ”

“ The first actual violence was begun by the police, who opened fire on the crowds in certain sections of the city from the housetops with their machine guns. A number of demonstrators were killed and wounded, but still the disorders did not yet become general. Where the police opened fire the more resolute elements of the crowds rushed in to attack them and killed them. And now came Protopopoff's pretext for ordering the soldiers to fire and to begin such a massacre as had squelched the premature uprising on Red Sunday twelve years before. ”

“ During the excitement, and the trial of the supposed conspirators, rumor proclaimed all, and doubtless more than all, the horrors of the plot. The city was to be fired in every quarter; the arsenal in the immediate vicinity was to be broken open, and the arms distributed to the insurgents, and a universal massacre of the white inhabitants to take place. Nor did there seem to be any doubt in the mind of the people, that such would actually have been the result had not the plot fortunately been detected before the time appointed for the outbreak. ”

“ The true motives behind the atrocities, of which we have collected such heart-breaking evidence, can only be, on the one hand, the desire to terrorise and demoralise the civil population, conformably to the inhuman theories of German military writers, and, on the other hand, the desire to pillage. A shot fired, no one knows where, or by whom, or at whom, by a drunken soldier, or an excitable official, serves as a pretext for the sacking of a whole city. ”

“ The shooting in cold blood of three or four hundred negroes and two companies of North Carolina troops who had joined our army, and even murdering peaceable citizens (as I have the personal knowledge of the killing, with the butt-end of a musket, of Mr. Spruell, the man whom I boarded with, and by the way, a secessionist, for objecting to the plundering of a trunk which he had packed) , were scenes of which the Confederates make no mention, except the hanging of one person, but of which many of us were eye-witnesses, was but the Fort Pillow massacre re-enacted. ”

“ It will be old news to you to speak in this letter about the late massacre of white and colored officers and soldiers at Fort Pillow, where General Forrest and his men murdered hundreds of our own brave fellows in cold blood. I understand that although that massacre occurred only a few days ago, so to speak, that the war-cry 'Remember Fort Pillow!' has already been made in quite a number of the most recent engagements between colored troops and rebels on the seat of war. ”

“ The inflamed hurts to be deepened with a pitchfork and perhaps further and mortally inflamed with a burning brand! Kindly Nature's passing lethargy to be quickened into conscious death in frantic anguish!
The twelve militia-men are never again mentioned. They are as if they had never been born, lived and toiled, never volunteered, never served, fought and fell. ”

“ Cruelty too monstrous for description, too vast to be believed by a mind not familiar with the outrages practised by the soldiers of Spain and Italy upon their heretic fellow-creatures, were now committed afresh in the streets of Maestricht.
On the first day four thousand men and women were slaughtered. The massacre lasted two days longer; nor would it be an exaggerated estimate, if we assume that the amount of victims upon the two last days was equal to half the number sacrificed on the first. It was said that not four hundred citizens were left alive after the termination of the siege. ”

“ Their method of executing their horrible designs, is by stealing upon the adverse party in the night; and if they find them unguarded, (which, however, I believe, is very seldom the case,) they kill every one indiscriminately; not even sparing the women and children. When the massacre is completed, they either feast and gorge themselves on the spot, or carry off as many of the dead bodies as they can, and devour them at home, with acts of brutality too shocking to be described. ”

“ The man who, independent of the last-named crime, could bring himself to forswear and massacre his own kindred, without a shadow of provocation upon their part, he felt deserved any death that the ingenuity of man could invent.
The march of the three was continued all through the night, and the halt in the morning was of but a few minutes duration, as Peterson felt fearful of pursuit in case the absence of the renegade was discovered. ”

“ But, while the meeting was still going on, Tyler went off to the Tower with a part of his horde, entered the fortress unopposed, and murdered the unhappy chancellor, Archbishop Sudbury, the treasurer, and several victims more. This was only the beginning of massacre. Instead of dispersing with their charters, as did many of the peasants, Tyler and his confederates ran riot through London, burning houses and slaying lawyers, officials, foreign merchants and other unpopular persons. ”

“ They are all most positive that there was no firing upon the German troops by the civil population. It seems to be generally believed that the massacre was due to resistance of retiring Belgian troops and the destruction of bridges and tunnels to cover their retreat. Whatever the provocation, the behaviour of the Germans was that of savages. ”

“ They saw their Cathedral in flames, they saw the shells deliberately aimed for it, they saw their inoffensive dead in the bombarded streets and they saw a just vengeance in allowing the German wounded to burn alive in the pyre of their own making. The mob, hoarse with rage and growing wilder every minute, raised its rifles to fire at the wounded men who had been carried out. ”