Complete Life of William McKinley and Story of His Assassination: An Authentic and Official Memorial Edition, Containing Every Incident in the Career of the Immortal Statesman, Soldier, Orator and PatriotEverett, Marshall
History
Complete Life of William McKinley and Story of His Assassination: An Authentic and Official Memorial Edition, Containing Every Incident in the Career of the Immortal Statesman, Soldier, Orator and Patriot
Of all the men who were subsequently arrested for this crime, only eight
were placed on trial. These were August Spies, Michael Schwab, Samuel
Fielden, Albert R. Parsons, Adolph Fischer, George Engel, and Louis
Lingg, who were found guilty and sentenced to death, and Oscar Neebe,
who was sentenced to fifteen years in the penitentiary. Lingg committed
suicide by blowing his head to pieces with a bomb while confined in the
jail awaiting execution. The sentences of Schwab and Fielden were
commuted to imprisonment for life by Governor Oglesby. The other four
were hanged in the county jail on November 11, 1887. They were buried at
Waldheim cemetery the following Sunday, November 13, and this occasion
was made memorable by the honors shown the dead by the anarchist
societies of Chicago. It was the last great outpouring of anarchy that
the city has seen. Schwab, Fielden, and Neebe were afterward pardoned by
Governor Altgeld, and released from the penitentiary.
Looking back upon the work of anarchy in the last fifty years or more
its results should be discouraging to any but the most hair-brained of
the type. Its violence has not altered or unsettled the course of a
single government against which it has been directed. If individuals
here and there have been murdered the crimes have reacted upon the tools
of butchery, most frequently sending the assassin to a dishonored grave,
leaving the name of his kinsman a reproach for all time. The seed of
ideal anarchy still is being sown, however, and its crop of crimes and
criminals may be expected to be harvested in the future, as in the past,
unless, by some concerted, radical efforts of civilization its bloody
sophistries are to be wiped from the world.
CHAPTER VII.
SCENES AT BUFFALO FOLLOWING THE ASSASSINATION.
The people of Buffalo and the visitors within their gates behaved
admirably during all the weary days and nights after the shooting of the
President. That spirit of mob law, which pervaded the multitude that
surged about the Temple of Music in the Exposition grounds at the time
of the shooting, speedily gave way to one of obedience to law. The
knowledge that the President’s life had not ebbed away, and that eminent
physicians said he would recover, had a tendency to restore men’s minds
to the normal, and soon the question which passed from man to man was
“what news from the President?”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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