Tuesday, October 19, 2010

The Kind Of Men Fremont Hangs

It has already been announced that Gen. Fremont has approved the verdict of the Court Martial sentencing to be hung two Secession marauders, Henry Kuhl and Hamilton W. Windon, for the murder of a young man, not a soldier, attached to one of our camps in Braxton county, Va.  The Kanawha Republican says:

The victim had been working for a farmer for a few weeks, and was on his return to camp, and on his way stopped at Kuhl’s house to rest.  Mrs. Kuhl went to the meadow, where her husband and son and Windon were mowing and told them there was a Union soldier at the house.  The murdered man was not a soldier.  The elder Kuhl told her to go back and tell the soldier to come out to the meadow to them.  In the mean time his murder was decided upon by the elder Kuhl and Windon, the young Kuhl not consenting.  When the young man came out to the meadow, the old man Kuhl approached him scythe in hand and with a single blow severed his head from his body.  He and Windon then ripped open his bowels and thrust in the head and then threw the body into a ditch near by and covered it up.  This is the substance of the old man’s confession, as to the murder. – When asked by the provost Marshal what induced him to murder the inoffensive young man, he replied, “I suppose the Devil made me do it.”

The Execution was fixed for May 9.

– Published in The Burlington Weekly Hawk-Eye, Burlington, Iowa, Saturday, May 17, 1862 p. 1

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