Truth Deferred: The National Guard Massacre

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. 

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.

Before the "boy murderer" goes to trial, newspapers inflame the city with a non-existent crime wave. Prosecutor Pugh rejects an offer to plead Berner guilty to 2nd degree murder, and the public is told that if this 17-year-old defendant isn’t hanged, every citizen will be a future target. But jurors hear a more nuanced and complicated story, creating a dangerous divide between the people who hear the evidence in court from the ones that only get it from newsprint.

When two body snatchers commit a triple homicide so barbaric that it shocks the nation, Cincinnatians grow more alarmed that the laws of human decency are coming untethered and that the legal system is no longer protecting them from falling victim to incredible violence. We also explore the recent, prolific history of lynchings to see how the public views its options.   

William Kirk was a horse trader with too many wives, an unlikely man to become a rallying cry for a city, but when he is brutally killed on Christmas Eve, and one of the accused “boy murderers” hires the venerated T.C. Campbell to defend him, a murder trial becomes a public litmus test for the entire justice system.

The heartless crime and multiple murder trials of “Crazy Joe” Payton introduce us to the morally pliable brilliance of attorney T.C. Campbell, his odd political alliance with The Cincinnati Enquirer, and his blood feud with the Commercial Gazette and a young, idealistic lawyer named William Howard Taft – personal animosities that will help re-write history.

Our story starts on Monday, March 31, 1884. The streets are covered in blood. Over 50 people are dead and some are dying in the hallways of the hospital. Every window has been smashed out of the jail, and the county courthouse is a smoldering ruin. To find out how we got here, we travel back to an imperfect love story ending in a public murder, and how the case of William McHugh illustrates a growing distrust of the criminal justice system.

Season One of Truth Deferred: The National Guard Massacre takes listeners through a series of grisly murders, into the minds of a public whipped into a lynch mob, and explains how it all ended in the largest slaughter of unarmed civilians by National Guard troops in U.S. history. Just as shockingly, hosts Mike and Amy Morgan reveal how the truth of these events was so successfully whitewashed that the real story has been buried for over 140 years – until now – and well also ask the unsettling question: could it happen again?