Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  They hastily organized, and then pushed forward with an eagerness in their purpose which defied all attempts at order and discipline, if any were made. Their advance was not that of a military expedition, but consciously and evidently that of a band of robbers and cut-throats, descending upon victims from whom they expected no resistance. And throughout the whole transaction, as if their deed were to have the lustre of no virtue, they behaved with infamous cowardice as well as treachery.

  It is pitiful to think of the blind trust and security in which their victims awaited them. The commandant at Fort Pitt, hearing of the expedition and its object, sent a messenger to warn the Christians of their peril, but he unhappily arrived too late. Yet they were not wholly taken unawares. Information of the approach of Williamson’s men had reached them through another channel; but they quietly continued their labors, unable to believe that any harm was meant them; and the murderers found them in the fields at work.

  In fact, they had almost completed their harvest, and they were preparing for an early departure when the whites appeared in their midst at Gnadenhütten. The first innocent life had been taken, and the hands extended in friendship to the Brethren were already stained with the blood of one of their number. About a mile from the village the whites found a half-breed boy, the son of the missionary Schebosch and his Indian wife, and, giving him a peaceful greeting, they approached and killed him with their tomahawks, he crying out between their blows that his father was a white man, and imploring them to spare him. To the main body of the Christians whom they found in the cornfields they now declared that they had come to remove them to Fort Pitt, where they would be safe from dangers that menaced them as the friends of the Americans, at the same time taking care to secure their rifles, lest in their extremity these helpless people should be tempted to make some effort at self-defence. The Brethren thanked them for their kindness, and mingled freely with their captors, who walked about among them, “engaging them in friendly conversation,” asking them concerning their civil and religious customs, and praising them for their practical Christianity. They persuaded them to send messengers with a detachment ordered to Salem, and urge the Brethren in the fields there to repair to Gnadenhütten. In the mean time, the whites remaining suddenly fell upon their bewildered prisoners and bound them; and the expedition, acting upon preconcerted measures, re-entered Gnadenhütten with the Salem converts disarmed and manacled.

  Although the purpose of the campaign had been perfectly understood from the beginning, the officers were now loath to execute it upon their own responsibility: and it is Doddridge’s belief, from his personal knowledge of Williamson’s character, that if he had been an officer with due authority, and not merely the leader of a band of marauders, he would not have suffered any of his prisoners to be slain. But he was powerless, and could only refer their fate to a vote of his men. When, therefore, it was demanded, Should the Christian Indians be put to death, or should they be sent to Fort Pitt? only eighteen voted to spare their lives. It still remained a question whether they should be burned alive, or tomahawked and scalped; and the majority having voted for the latter form of murder, one of the assassins was deputed to inform the Indians, that, inasmuch as they were Christians, they would be given one night to prepare for death in a Christian manner.

  It is related that the merciful eighteen reiterated their protests to the last against the atrocity, but neither their protests nor the appeals of the Indians availed. One of the women who had been educated at Bethlehem, and who spoke good English, fell upon her knees at Williamson’s feet, and besought his protection; but the greater number of the victims seem to have submitted silently, with something of the old stoical fortitude of the savage, and some thing of the martyr’s serene resignation. They embraced with tears and kisses, and asked forgiveness one of another, and thus meekly prepared themselves for their doom. They were Christians whose lives had witnessed to the sincerity of their conversion; and, now brought face to face with death, their faith remained unshaken. Among them were five of the national assistants, one of whom was well educated in English, and all of whom were men of exemplary thought and deed. These led the rest in the fervent prayers and hymns with which they wore away the night.

  At dawn the assassins grew impatient of the delay they had granted, and sent to the Brethren, demanding whether they were not yet ready to die; and, being answered that they had commended their souls to God and received the assurance of His peace, the whites parted them, the men from the women and children, and placed them in two houses, to which, from some impulse of grotesque and ferocious drollery, they gave the name of the Slaughter-Houses.

  Few even among those who had voted for the murder of the Brethren took part in the actual butchery. The great body of the whites turned aside from the ineffable atrocity, while those who with their own hands did the murder now entered the cabins.

  The house in which the men were confined had been that of a cooper, and his mallet, abandoned in the removal of the preceding autumn, lay upon the floor. One of the whites picked it up, and saying “How exactly this will answer for the business!” made his way among the kneeling figures toward Brother Abraham, a convert, who, from being somewhat lukewarm in the faith, had in this extremity become the most fervent in exhortation. Then, while the clear and awful music of the victims’ prayers and songs arose, this nameless murderer lifted his weapon and struck Abraham down with a single blow. Thirteen others fell by his hand before he passed the mallet to a fellow-assassin, with the words “My arm fails me. Go on in the same way. I think I have done pretty well.” In the house where the women and children awaited their doom the massacre began with Judith, a very old and pious widow; and in a little space, the voices of singing and of supplication failing one by one, the silence that fell upon the place attested the accomplishment of a crime which, for all its circumstances and conditions, must be deemed one of the blackest in history. The murderers scalped their victims as they fell, and, when the work was done, they gathered their trophies together and rejoined their comrades. But before nightfall they came again to the Slaughter-Houses for some reason; and as they entered that of the men, one of the Brethren who had been stunned and scalped, but not killed, lifted himself upon his hands, and turned his blood-stained visage towards them with a ghastly stare. They fell upon the horrible apparition, and it sank beneath their tomahawks to rise no more; and then, with that wild craving for excitement which seems the first effect of crime in the guilty, they set fire to the cabins, and, withdrawing to a little distance, spent the night in drunken revelry by the light of the burning shambles.

  The sole witnesses of their riot were two Indian boys, who had almost miraculously escaped the general butchery, and who afterwards met in the woods outside of the village. One of them had been knocked down and scalped with the rest, and, reviving like the Brother who was killed on the return of the murderers to the Slaughter-Houses, had taken warning by his fate, and, feigning death, had fled as soon as they were gone. The other, having concealed himself beneath the house of the women and children, remained there, the blood dripping down upon him through the floor, until nightfall. A companion who had taken refuge with him, and attempted to escape with him through the cabin window, stuck fast and was burned to death.

  “Thus,” says Bishop Loskiel,— “thus ninety-six persons magnified the name of the Lord by patiently meeting a cruel death;” and he adds in another place, with a meek self-denial of one who had fain claimed the greater glory for his people, that inasmuch as, from the admissions of the murderers, the Moravians were destroyed not as Christians, but as Indians, “I will not therefore compare them with the martyrs of the ancient Church, who were sometimes sacrificed in great numbers to the rage of their persecutors, on account of their faith in Christ. But this much I can confidently assert, that these Christian Indians approved themselves to the end as steadfast confessors of the truth, . . . and delivered themselves without resistance to the cruel hands of their bloodthirsty murderers,
and thus bore witness to the truth and efficacy of the Gospel of Jesus.” Brother John Holmes, writing like Bishop Loskiel at a distance, accepts this strict construction of the position of the Indians in the Church; but Heckewelder, whose life for many years had been passed in the closest and tenderest association with these hapless victims, — who had doubtless been the means of conversion to many, who had joined them in marriage, and had baptized their little ones, who had shared their lowly joys and sorrows, sat at their boards and by the beds of their dying, — has no heart for these ecclesiastical niceties, but breaks into lamentation none the less touching because the words awkwardly express the anguish of his spirit: “Here they were now murdered, together with the little children! — the loving children who so harmoniously raised their voices in the chapel, at their singing-schools, and in their parents’ houses, in singing praises to the Lord! — those whose tender years, innocent countenances, and tears made no impression on these pretended white Christians, were all butchered with the rest!”

  What recoil of their crime, if any, there was upon the Gnadenhütten murderers themselves, is not certainly known. A dim tradition, one of the few in the West which have not yet hardened into print, relates that their leader in after years lost the popular favor that he consented to buy at so dear a cost. Old friends looked on him coldly, and the humanity of a younger generation regarded him with horror. He could never be brought to speak of the atrocious deed, and his men shunned all talk of it. But since, in the year following the massacre, the same leader and men organized a force to complete their work of murder by taking off the remaining converts in this refuge at Sandusky, it may be doubted whether the defeat that attended this effort, and the burning of such of their number as were captured by the Indians, in avowed revenge for the murder of the Christians, were not the only regrettable circumstances connected in their minds with the Gnadenhütten massacre, until a better and more civilized public sentiment illumined them. Their act at the time did not lack defenders in Eastern gazettes, and many years afterwards Heckewelder tells that he met and rebuked a ruffian who justified them, and regretted that they had not killed all the Christian Indians. It is true that the Gnadenhütten murderers but fulfilled a long-cherished purpose of the backwoodsmen, which had been formed and attempted twenty years earlier in Pennsylvania; and it can be said, in their defence, that they had provocation as well to cruelty as to mercy. The race and color of their victims represented to them the pitiless savages who had so often desolated their homes, sparing neither age nor sex, and holding them in continual wrath and terror; and though many white prisoners owed their welfare or their ransom to the humane offices of the Moravians, the compulsory hospitality of the Muskingum villages to the war parties of marauding Indians was, as has been said, a constant offence to the pioneers. Yet this offence, at the time of the massacre, had entirely ceased, through the removal of the Christians to Sandusky, and the murder was utterly wanton. Doubtless the slaughter of a few Indians, more or less, was not quite a crime to their tough consciences; in the ethics of the border, according to Heckewelder, it was no more harm to kill an Indian than a buffalo, — a sentiment which with contemporary moralists of our Western plains finds expression in the maxim, “Good Indians dead Indians.” We can perhaps hardly arraign these murderers before any tribunal of civilized thought; but their deed was nevertheless hideous, and it was most lamentable in its consequences, for it weakened, if it did not break, the hope of a whole race. It was so horrible, that in the face of it the Moravians never regained full courage, nor the Indians full trust; and though the Moravian mission to the Delawares continued for some forty years thereafter, the early vigor of the enterprise was never restored.

  The crime, indeed, had the far-reaching consequences of every evil action; it embittered the warfare between the whites and Indians in ten-fold degree, and filled their infrequent truces with hazard and doubt. Nay, it seems to have broken up all foundation of faith as well as mercy between the two races; many of the converts themselves relapsed into heathenism, and were lost among the multitude of warriors; and when the Moravians sent to seek these out and reclaim them, they sometimes found their bewildered minds filled with a dreadful and unimagined suspicion. “I cannot,” said such a one to the Indian brother who discovered him among the warlike savages, painted and armed like the rest,— “I cannot but have bad thoughts of our teachers. I think it was their fault that so many of our countrymen were murdered at Gnadenhütten. They betrayed us and informed the white people of our being there, by which they were enabled to surprise us with ease. Tell me now, is this the truth or not?” This poor soul had lost all his children and most of his kindred in the massacre, and even when brought to see the injustice of his suspicions, he was impotent to repair the wrong or to return to his old life. “I have now a wicked and malicious heart,” he said, mournfully, “and therefore my thoughts are evil. As I look outwardly,” he continued, pointing to his crimson paint and warrior’s plumes, “so is my heart within. What would it avail if I were outwardly to appear as a believer, and my heart were full of evil?”

  There yet stands beside the Muskingum, near the site of the hapless Indian village, a little hamlet bearing the pious name of Gnadenhütten, and its chapel bells still call the Moravian Brethren to the worship of their ancient church. But no Christian of Indian blood shares in the celebration of its rites; the stone foundations of the cabins, some aged apple-trees planted by their hands, and a few pathetic traces of the fire that consumed the victims of the massacre, alone remain to attest the success and the disastrous close of the Moravians’ loving and devoted labors at Gnadenhütten. The survivors of the great murder and of the cold and famine of that winter at Sandusky attempted a settlement in Canada under British protection, and later built a village in Northern Ohio; but they always longed to return to the Muskingum, to their old fields, and to the scenes endeared to them by so many years of happiness and consecrated by the sufferings of so many of their kindred. Before the close of the century this wish was gratified through the Congressional grant to the Christian Indians of all the lands assigned them by the Delawares; and they came back and founded near the ruins of Schönbrunn a new town called Goshen. Their teachers came with them, and Heckewelder, assisted by a Moravian Brother, gathered together the charred bones of the Indian martyrs, and gave them Christian burial. But the life of the experiment was gone, as if their hopes had been buried in that grave. Defeat met the renewed efforts at conversion; the influences of the border infected the broken and disheartened people; Zeisberger died; the rigid laws of the community were trampled upon by the borderers, among whom the war of 1812 revived all the old bitterness against the Indians; drink was brought into the village; and, before the removal of the community to Canada in 1823, the spectacle of drunken converts in the streets bore witness, if not to the inherent viciousness of the Indian, at least to the white man’s success in tempting and depraving him.

  TUSCAN CITIES

  CONTENTS

  PREFACE.

  A FLORENTINE MOSAIC

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  XXII

  XXIII

  XXIV

  XXV

  XXVI.

  XXVII

  XXVIII

  XXIX

  XXX

  XXXI

  XXXII

  XXXIII

  XXXIV

  XXXV

  XXXVI

  XXXVII

  XXXVIII

  XXXIX

  XL

  PAN FORTE DI SIENA

  I

  II

  III

  IV
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  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  PITILESS PISA

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII.

  INDUSTRIOUS LUCCA

  I

  II

  III

  PISTOJA, PRATO, and FIESOLE

  I

  II

  III

  PREFACE.

  THE wish to see this book in the same size and shape as Venetian Life and Italian Journeys was the motive on the author’s part which prompted the publishers to the present edition. A score of years had elapsed between the writing of those books and the writing of this, and yet he felt a kind of unity in all three which he hoped might be appreciable to the reader in the uniformity aimed at.

  Perhaps it is not indiscreet here to confess another hope of his: that it might be more apparent in the unpictured text, than in the illustrated pages of the former editions, that each of these studies offered to the reader an historical view, however cursory, of those famous Tuscan Cities, which it would not be so easy otherwise for him to find. It was part of the author’s pleasure, in visiting them, to arrange a hasty perspective of this sort, which seemed to him essential to a right sense of their modern qualities and conditions; and he trusts that he does not value it too much because of the difficulty he had in contriving it. The reader at least will be spared his difficulty.

  A FLORENTINE MOSAIC

  I

  FROM Turin to Bologna there was snow all the way down; not, of course, the sort of snow we had left on the other side of the Alps, or the snow we remembered in America, but a snow picturesque, spectacular, and no colder or bleaker to the eye from the car-window than the cotton-woolly counterfeit which clothes a landscape of the theatre. It covered the whole Lombard plain to the depth of several inches, and formed a very pretty decoration for the naked vines and the trees they festooned. A sky which remained thick and dun throughout the day contributed to the effect of winter, for which, indeed, the Genoese merchant in our carriage said it was now the season.