Truth Deferred: The National Guard Massacre

10: Can It Happen Again?

The riot seals the fate of convicted killers Joe Palmer, William McHugh, and the accused Avondale murderers. People want vengeance, and all these men will leave the jail dead, although Allen Ingalls has one final life to take, and he will leave haunting questions about how many people he murdered before the Taylor family after he is gone. While Berner does prison time, Palmer gets the dubious distinction of being the last man hanged in Cincinnati. Some politicians will suffer retribution at the ballot boxes, but by 1886, many of the people most directly responsible for the bad decisions, lack of leadership, and incompetence that left such a horrific death toll will come together in a banquet, where they will all seem to agree that it is no longer too soon to recall the National Guard Massacre with lighthearted humor.

9: Blame the Immigrants

Years later, as Will Taft is on a meteoric rise through the ranks towards US President and Supreme Court Justice, he reveals that all he learned from the Cincinnati National Guard Massacre was that when the working class rise up in protest, soldiers need to mow them down in the streets. But in 1884, the last chance to hold any of the people responsible for the massacre accountable is squandered by the County Coroner for blatantly and shamefully partisan political reasons. The Coroner’s “Inquest” becomes the coup de grace.

8: Taft v. Campbell

Although only one of them is a huge public spectacle, the first week of April is full of funerals. As dozens of dead are buried, finger-pointing begins. There will be three public inquiries, and William Howard Taft becomes the bulldog for both a Special Grand Jury and a Cincinnati Bar Association investigation into T.C. Campbell. For personal and partisan reasons, the National Guard and all the public officials are excluded from scrutiny, the blame for everything is laid at the feet of Campbell, and in an epic battle that gets increasingly personal, Taft pursues his white whale through both criminal bribery charges and a disbarment trial like none before it or since.

7: The Courthouse Riot

On Saturday morning, a remarkable number of citizens are dead, but the prisoners have all been saved. Some believe that the trouble has passed, but Sheriff Hawkins disagrees, and he begs Ohio Governor Hoadly to send as many National Guard troops as possible. Hoadly’s indecisiveness squanders critical time, and when the first reinforcements finally arrive and Hoadly is frantically sending every member of the Ohio National Guard racing to Cincinnati, the county courthouse is an inferno, a Gatling Gun is trained on curiosity seekers, and soldiers are ordered straight into an angry crowd of thousands, resulting in a senseless and astounding slaughter of unarmed citizens.

6: The Rich Form a Lynch Mob

As a comically stupid plan to sneak Berner to prison unravels, affluent Cincinnatians call a mass meeting, where speakers praise lynchings in nearby towns and whip the crowd into a frenzy. Afterward, people start marching to the jail. As the crowd grows to thousands, people grab battering rams, sledgehammers, and nooses, intent on breaking down the doors and hanging the accused killers inside. Despite obvious danger, the jail is unguarded, and by the time a few dozen poorly trained Ohio National Guardsmen are called into duty, the jail is overrun by a lynch mob, and it is surrounded by a crowd of over 10,000 people. Guardsmen respond by opening fire at random.