They are Massacred.

When the murderers told the doomed Moravians their fate, they merely requested a short delay in which to prepare themselves for death.  They asked one another’s pardon for whatever wrongs they might have done, knelt down and prayed, kissed one another farewell, “and began to sing hymns of hope and of praise to the Most High.”  Then the white butchers entered the houses and put to death the ninety-six men, women, and children that were within their walls.  More than a hundred years have passed since this deed of revolting brutality; but even now a just man’s blood boils in his veins at the remembrance.  It is impossible not to regret that fate failed to send some strong war party of savages across the path of these inhuman cowards, to inflict on them the punishment they so richly deserved.  We know that a few of them were afterwards killed by the Indians; it is a matter of keen regret that any escaped.

When the full particulars of the affair were known, all the best leaders of the border, almost all the most famous Indian fighters, joined in denouncing it. [Footnote:  Col.  James Smith, then of Kentucky, in 1799 calls it “an act of barbarity equal to any thing I ever knew to be committed by the savages themselves, except the burning of prisoners.”] Nor is it right that the whole of the frontier folk should bear the blame for the deed.  It is a fact, honorable and worthy of mention, that the Kentuckians were never implicated in this or any similar massacre. [Footnote:  The Germans of up-country North Carolina were guilty of as brutal massacres as the Scotch-Irish backwoodsmen of Pennsylvania.  See Adair, 245.  There are two or three individual instances of the barbarity of Kentuckians—­one being to the credit of McGarry,—­but they are singularly few, when the length and the dreadful nature of their Indian wars are taken into account.  Throughout their history the Kentucky pioneers had the right on their side in their dealings with the Indians.  They were not wanton aggressors; they entered upon vacant hunting-grounds, to which no tribe had a clear title, and to which most even of the doubtful titles had been fairly extinguished.  They fought their foes fiercely, with varying fortune, and eventually wrested the land from them; but they very rarely wronged them; and for the numerous deeds of fearful cruelty that were done on Kentucky soil, the Indians were in almost every case to blame.]

But at the time, and in their own neighborhood—­the corner of the Upper Ohio valley where Pennsylvania and Virginia touch,—­the conduct of the murderers of the Moravians roused no condemnation.  The borderers at first felt about it as the English Whigs originally felt about the massacre of Glencoe.  For some time the true circumstances of the affair were not widely known among them.  They were hot with wrath against all the red-skinned race; and they rejoiced to hear of the death of a number of treacherous Indians who pretended to be peaceful, while harboring and giving aid and comfort to, and occasionally letting their own young men join, bands of avowed murderers.  Of course, the large wicked and disorderly element was loud in praise of the deed.  The decent people, by their silence, acquiesced.