etter and happier world, "where the
wicked cease from troubling and the weary find rest." When told that
they were doomed to die, they all affectionately embraced, and
bedewing their bosoms with mutual tears, reciprocally sought, and
obtained forgiveness for any offences which they might have given each
other through life. Thus at peace with God, and reconciled with one
another, they replied to those, who impatient for the slaughter had
asked if they were not yet prepared, "Yes! We have commended our souls
to God, and are ready to die."

What must have been the obduracy of those, who could remain inflexible
in their doom of death, amid such scenes as these? How ruthless &
unrelenting their hearts, who unmoved by the awful spectacle of so
many fellow creatures, preparing for the sudden and violent
destruction of life and asking of their God, mercy for themselves and
forgiveness for their enemies--could yet thirst for blood, and
manifest impatience that its shedding was delayed for an instant? Did
not the possibility of that innocence, which has been ever since so
universally accorded to their victims, once occur to them; or were
their minds so under the influence of exasperation and resentment,
that they ceased to think of any thing, but the gratification of those
feelings? Had they been about to avenge the murder of friends on its
_known authors_, somewhat might have been pardoned to retaliation and
to vengeance; but involving all in one common ruin, for _the supposed
offences_ of a few, there can be no apology for their conduct,--no
excuse for their crime.

It were well, if all memory of the tragedy at Gnadenhutten, were
effaced from the mind; but it yet lives in the recollection of many
and stands recorded on the polluted page of history.--Impartial truth
requires, that it should be here set down.

A few of the prisoners, supposed to have been actively engaged in war,
were the first to experience their doom. They were tied and taken some
distance from the houses in which [237] they had been confined;
despatched with spears and tomahawks, and scalped. The remainder of
both sexes, from the hoary head of decrepitude, incapable of wrong, to
helpless infancy, pillowed on its mother's breast, were cruelly &
shockingly murdered; and the different apartments of those houses of
blood, exhibited their bleeding bodies, mangled by the tomahawk,
scalping knife and spear, and disfigured by the war-club and the
mallet.[3]

Thu