The Sun.
London, England, 1866-08-25 00:00:00

The Massacre at New Orleans.

The massacre at Memphis was a brutal outrage
on a portion of the population who bad fallen under
the ban of another portion. It showed a spirit of
uncontrollable hatred, of lawlessness, and untamed
savagery, but it had not the political significance
of the late massacre at New Orleans. At Memphis
the negroes fell under the clubs and pistols of their
mean white assailants ; at New Orleans the victims
aimed at were prominent Republican citizens. It
was in fact a renewal of the war, the South being
led by its old leaders against their political oppo-
nents, and with all the venom of a defeated and
humiliated body finding itself in the ascendant,
and its defenceless foe at its mercy. The Mayor of
New Orleans, Major Monroe, is a pardoned rebel.
Declaring the Convention which was not elected
by the people, but appointed by Northern generals
during the war to be an illegal assembly, he de-
termined to suppress it. The proclamation calling
the Convention together was issued by the Gover-
nor of the State, but the document was so far in-
complete that neither the signature of the Secretary
of State nor the official seal had been affixed.
Major Monroe directed the police against this as-
sembly of almost unarmed gentlemen much in the
way he would have stormed a position at the
head of his Confederate soldiers. llad soldiers shot
down and brutally ill-treated those who surrendered
they would have disgraced honourable warfare.
In this Union city, however, prominent men, se-
lected for their known and staunch loyalty, sitting
in convention assembled by order of the Governor,
were not merely arrested : they were destroyed as
mad dogs arc destroyed. Their means of escape
cut off, the building surrounded, an indiscriminate
fire opened on those that remained, and a cruel
death awaiting those that fled. The evidence is
clear that the police were foremost in the attack,
not to arrest, but to kill.

Governor Wells justified. the assembling of the
Convention, and declared that the attack made
on it originated from a pre-concerted conspiracy,
and affidavits have been sworn • to, charging the
Mayor and Sheriff with complicity with homicide
during the riots. From the account given by Dr.
Dostic, one of the desperately wounded Conven-
tioners, it appears that his injuries were received
from the police, himself unarmed, and while vainly
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tchcewp to
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ex-
clamations which greeted him from respectably-
dressed business men were--" Kill him, the Yankee
white nigger ! " Ex-gov.ernor Hahn was shot in
the back, and brutally ill-used by the mob while
in the hands of the police. A white handkerchief,
held out as a signal of surrender, met only derisive
jeers, and a general discharge of pistols. So far
was the feeling carried, that Mr. Share after being
badly wounded, was refused admittance to his hotel
on the ground that the other guests would not in-
habit the house with a black Republican.
Those arrested were not the murderers, but the
victims who had escaped with their lives. If these
be the results of the great Northern victory, we
would like to know to what Southern success would
have led ? If with such timely warnings before
them the Republican party permit these outrages
on men whose only crime has been in strongly ad-
hering to the principles for which they contended,
they will deserve the fate in store for them. If
they have freed the negroes to hand then over,
bound hand and foot, to the tender mercies of such
savages, instead of bestowing a boon, and redeeming
their land from a curse, they will have decreed the
extermination of the race, and have left an ever-
lasting blot on their own reputation. To soothe
down the asperities left by war, and to con-
ciliate the people conquered in the strife, large
concessions might be made, and generous acts of
amnesty passed. But to deal with such men as
these requires an iron hand and a strong will.
The city that fell to Northern arms without firing
a shot will not raise its fame by such butcheries,
nor will the interests of these States be in any way
advanced by the reign of terror they are endeavour-
ing to establish over the freedmen. Indeed we be-
lieve that no acts could have more weakened the
hands of a friendly President, and knit more firmly
the powerful opposition organised against his policy
Had the South shown an inclination to meet in a
friendly spirit the darling object of the North to bind
the States again into one Union, public opinion
would gradually have aided the President in his
efforts, but the suicidal acts of Memphis and New
Orleans will convince men of moderate opinions
that Congress is right in its opposition to Mr.
Johnson's plan of reconstruction. The waverers
throughout the Union will see the necessity of a
strong military control over spirits proved to be
actuated by such undying hatred, and Congress
will be more than ever confirmed in its belief
that such men as Major Alonroe are totally unfitted
to hold any State or Federal post, though a thousand
times pardoned for crimes in which they glory. It
is now clearly shown that to place theso men in
such posts is simply to give efficient arms to a
deadly enemy. No sophistry will be likely to per-
suade those at whose throats the knives are likely to
be aimed of the wisdom of thus arming their ad-
versaries. If a second civil war is to be avoided,
there is one way only of dealing with such cities as
Memphis and New Orleans, and that is by crushing
out their hatred under the heavy weight of
rigorously executed Martial Law.—Anglo-American
Times.

Henry Ward Beecher " indignantly disavows "
the volume of " Pulpit Pungencies," recently issued by
Mr. Carleton, and from which we made copious extracts
in a late issue of the Home Journal" The celebrated
divine calls the book an " unauthorised compilation," and
further says :—" Mr. Carleton, without Mr. Beecher's
knowledge or consent, has gone through the discourses,
selecting on the principle of phrases and catch-words, an d
has produced a volume of idioms and singularities, made
by violently separating sentences from the context and
from their meanings." Some of the "Pungencies " cer-
tainly sound Spurgeon like.
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