Page:Biography and Family Record of Lorenzo Snow monochrome.djvu/177

 shot clown our cattle and hogs for sport, burned our dwellings, inhumanly butchered some eighteen or twenty defenceless citizens, dragged from their hiding places little children, and placing the muzzles of their guns to their heads, shot them, with the most horrid oaths and imprecations. An aged hero and patriot of the revolution, who served under General Washington, while in the act of pleading for quarters, was cruelly murdered and hewed in pieces with an old corn-cutter; and in addition to all these savage acts of barbarity, they forcibly dragged virtuous and inoffensive females from their dwellings, bound them upon benches used for public worship, where they, in great numbers, ravished them in a most brutal manner. Some fifty or sixty of the citizens were thrust into prisons and dungeons, where, bound in chains, they were fed on human flesh, while their families, and some fifteen thousand others, were, at the point of the bayonet, forcibly expelled from the State. In the meantime, to pay the expenses of these horrid outrages, they confiscated our property, and robbed us of all our possessions. Before our final expulsion, with a faint and lingering hope, we petitioned the State Legislature, then in session, unwilling to believe that American citizens could appeal in vain for a restoration of liberty, cruelly wrested from them by cruel tyrants. But in the language of our noble ancestors, "our repeated petitions were only answered by repeated injuries." The Legislature, instead of hearing the cries of fifteen thousand suffering, bleeding, unoffending citizens, sanctioned and sealed the unconstitutional acts of the Governor and his troops, by appropriating two hundred thousand dollars to defray the expenses of exterminating us from the State.

No friendly arm was stretched out to protect us. The last ray of hope for redress in that State was now entirely extinguished. We saw no other alternative but to bow down our necks and wear the cruel yoke of oppression, and quietly and submissively suffer ourselves to be banished as exiles from our possessions, our property, and our sacred homes; or otherwise see our wives and children coldly murdered and butchered by tyrants in power.

Fourth. Our next permanent settlement was in the land of our exile, thie State of Illinois, in the spring of 1839. But even here we are not secure from our relentless persecutor, the State of Missouri. Not satisfied in having drenched her soil in the blood of innocence, and expelling us from her borders, she pursues her unfortunate victims into banishment, seizing upon and kidnapping them in their defenceless moments, dragging them across the Mississippi River, upon their inhospitable shores, where they are tortured, whipped, immured in dungeons, and hung by the neck without any legal process whatever. We have memorialized the former executive