As long as Pete Donan was the editor of the Lexington Caucasian, that
paper once each year published an account substantially in this wise:
“So long as God gives us life and the earth is cursed with the presence of
McNeil we feel it to be our solemn duty to rehearse once every year the
story of the most atrocious and horrible occurrence in the annals of
barbarous warfare.”
“On Friday, the 17th day of October, 1862, a deed was enacted at the fair
grounds at Palmyra, Mo., which sent a thrill of horror through the
civilized world.”
“Ten brave and true and innocent men were taken from their prison, driven
to the edge of the town, seated on their rough board coffins, for no crime
of their own, and murdered like so many swine.”
“Murdered!”
“Butchered!!”
“By the hell-spawned and hell-bound, trebly damned old blotch upon
creation’s face, John McNeil, until recently by the grace of bayonets, Tom
Fletcher, and the devil, sheriff of St. Louis county.”
“Murdered!”
“Shot to death!!”
“There was our poor, handsome, gallant boyhood friend Tom Sidener—”
“As pure a soul as ever winged its flight from blood-stained sod to that
God who will yet to all eternity damn the fiendish butcher, McNeil.”
“Poor Tom!”
“He was engaged to be married to a young lady in Monroe county.”
“When he learned he was to be shot, he sent for his wedding suit, which
had just been made, declaring that if he couldn’t be married in it; he
intended to die in it.”
“Arrayed in his elegant black broad cloth, and his white silk vest, when
he mounted his coarse plank coffin, in the wagon that was to bear him to
his death he looked as if he was going to be married instead of shot.”
“The very guards cried like children when they bade him goodbye.”
“Raising his cap and bowing to the weeping women who lined the streets, he
was driven from their sight forever!”
“Half an hour afterward six musket balls had pierced his noble heart, and
his white silk vest was torn and dyed with his martyr blood!”
“There was poor old Willis Baker, his head whitened with the snows of more
than seventy winters—”
“Heroic old man!”
“With his white hair streaming in the wind, he seated himself on his rude
coffin and died without a shudder; refusing with his last breath to
forgive his executioners, and swearing he would ‘meet them and torment
them in hell through all eternity.’ ”
“There was that helpless, half-idiot boy from Lewis county, who allowed
himself to be blindfolded; then hearing Sidener and the others refuse,
slipped up one corner of the bandage, and seeing the rest with their eyes
uncovered, removed the handkerchief from his own, died as innocent as a
lamb.”
“There were Humstead and Bixler, and Lake, and McPheeters.”
“And there was that most wondrous martyr of them all—young Smith, of Knox
county—who died for another man.”
“Humphrey was the doomed man.”
“His heart-broken wife, in widow’s weeds, with her eight helpless little
ones in deep mourning, that was only less black than the anguish they
endured, or the heart of him to whom they appealed, rushed to the feet of
McNeil, and in accents so piteous that a soul of adamant must have melted
under it, besought him for the life of the husband and father.”
“She was brutally repulsed.”
“But Strachan, the monster of Shelby county, whom the angel a few months
afterward smote with Herodian rottenness—Strachan, whose flesh literally
fell from his living skeleton—Strachan, who has long been paying in the
deepest, blackest, hottest hole in perdition the penalty of his forty-ply
damnation-deserving crimes was provost marshal.”
“He saw the frantic agony of the woman; called her into his office and
told her he would save her husband if she would give him three hundred
dollars and then submit—but oh! humanity shudders, sickens at the horrid
proposal.”
“The wretched, half-crazed, agonized wife, not knowing what she
did—acceded to save her husband’s life—and the next morning she was found
lying insane and nearly dead, with her baby at her breast, near the public
spring at Palmyra.”
“And after all this, her husband was only released on condition that
another should be shot in his place.”
“Young Smith was selected.”
“And then ensued a contest without a parallel in all the six thousand
years of human history.”
“Humphrey refused to let any man die in his stead, declaring he should
feel himself a murderer if he did.”
“Smith protested that he was only a poor orphan boy, and so far as he knew
there was not a soul on earth to grieve for him; that Humphrey had a large
family entirely dependent upon him for daily bread, and it was his duty to
live while he could.”
“And Smith, the simple country lad, only seventeen years old, the Hero
without a peer on all Fame’s mighty scroll, took his seat on a rough
box—and was shot!”
“Will not God eternally damn his murderers?”
“We might dwell for hours on the incidents connected with this most
frightful butchery of ancient or modern ages.”
“But why go on?”
“The murder was done!”
“The Confederate government talked of demanding the murderer McNeil.”
“Then a ‘memorial’ was gotten up, and signed by two thousand Missourians,
recommending the heaven-earth-and-hell-accursed old monster, on account of
his Palmyra massacre, to special favor and he was promoted to a
brigadier-generalship.”