Category Archives: Wartime Executions

1574: Joseph Boniface de La Mole, La Reine Margot’s lover

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On this date in 1574, nobleman Joseph Boniface de La Mole was beheaded in Paris for a supposed plot against the king.

As the year would imply, La Mole was a casualty of France’s decades-long Wars of Religion.

Two years prior, in an attempt to cement an unsteady peace, the king’s sister Marguerite de Valois had been married off to the Protestant Henri of Navarre. As Paris teemed with Huguenots in town to celebrate the nuptials, the Catholic party sprang the infamous St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.

As if things weren’t awkward enough with the in-laws, Henri was now made to live at the royal court, feigning conversion to Catholicism. His relationship with Marguerite went off to a rocky start; both took other lovers.

Joseph Boniface de La Mole (English Wikipedia entry | French) was one of Marguerite’s. You’ll find this adulterous couple steaming up the screen in the 1994 film La Reine Margot, which is based on a Dumas novel of the same title.


In real life, La Mole was 27 years Marguerite’s senior.

Meanwhile, civil strife ebbed and flowed.

Desperate to escape his gilded cage, Henri in 1574 was part of a Protestant coup attempt that boldly aimed to seize the sickly King Charles IX and his mother Catherine de’ Medici at Saint-Germain.

The conspiracy failed, but its principals — including not only our Henri, but also the King’s Protestant-friendly brother the Duke of Alencon, and the Duke of Montmorency* — were too august for severe punishment. Catherine de’ Medici, whose children kept dying on her (Charles IX would do likewise in May of 1574), was desperately trying to navigate the civil war with a Valois heir in place who had enough political support to rule; going all-in with the realm’s Catholic ultras (most characteristically represented by the House of Guise, which wanted Henri beheaded for this treason) would have permanently alienated all the Huguenots.

The likes of La Mole, however, were not so safe.

He and one Annibal de Coconnas, members of the court’s Huguenot circle who “had nothing of the divinity that hedged the princes of the blood,” were seized on April 8 and interrogated for an alleged scheme to murder the sovereign — possibly at the instigation of the Guises, trying to implicate through this pair the more powerful Huguenot lords.

After the inevitable blade fell on them, Marguerite supposedly kept her former lover’s severed head in a jeweled box. But the nobleman had at least the consolation of a rich literary afterlife. Besides the Dumas novel aforementioned, the La Mole family — our man’s supposed descendants — feature prominently in Stendhal’s The Red and the Black.

‘Let us take a turn in the garden,’ said the Academician, delighted to see this chance of delivering a long and formal speech. ‘What! Is it really possible that you do not know what happened on the 30th of April, 1574?’ ‘Where?’ asked Julien, in surprise. ‘On the Place de Greve.’ Julien was so surprised that this name did not enlighten him. His curiosity, the prospect of a tragic interest, so attuned to his nature, gave him those sparkling eyes which a story-teller so loves to see in his audience. The Academician, delighted to find a virgin ear, related at full length to Julien how, on the 30th of April, 1574, the handsomest young man of his age, Boniface de La Mole, and Annibal de Coconasso, a Piedmontese gentleman, his friend, had been beheaded on the Place de Greve. ‘La Mole was the adored lover of Queen Marguerite of Navarre; and observe,’ the Academician added, ‘that Mademoiselle de La Mole is named Mathilde-Marguerite. La Mole was at the same time the favourite of the Duc d’Alencon and an intimate friend of the King of Navarre, afterwards Henri IV, the husband of his mistress. On Shrove Tuesday in this year, 1574, the Court happened to be at Saint-Germain, with the unfortunate King Charles IX, who was on his deathbed. La Mole wished to carry off the Princes, his friends, whom Queen Catherine de’ Medici was keeping as prisoners with the Court. He brought up two hundred horsemen under the walls of Saint-Germain, the Due d’Alencon took fright, and La Mole was sent to the scaffold.

In Stendhal’s novel, it is Julien’s sexual conquest of the pretty young Mathilde de La Mole that sets in motion Julien’s ruin and execution.

Joseph Boniface de La Mole’s lover fared far better than that of his fictional descendant. Henri would eventually make his escape after all, and through fortune and intrepidity made Marguerite the Queen of all France** when he decided at last that Paris was worth a Mass.

* The man in our story was the second Duke of Montmorency; his nephew, the fourth duke, was beheaded in 1632.

** The marriage was never comfortable, and Henri and Marguerite continued to live and love separately until they finally annulled the union in 1599.

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1801: Angre Kethi, Polygar prey

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On this date in 1801, a luckless British messenger was hanged to a Tamarind tree during the Polygar Wars.

The Polygars — an English corruption of the Tamil word Palaiyakkarar — were feudal administrators in South India whose authorities the ascending East India Company struggled to bring to heel.

A brief first rebellion in 1799 gave way to a second more substantial one from 1800 to 1805; these are the Polygar Wars.

As one might imagine the fight was quite nasty, and not wanting for executions. Notably, the British had hanged a Polygar chief named Kattabomman in 1799 after the first Polygar War.

But one of Kattabomman’s old allies, name of Ethalappa Naicker Zamin, was among a coalition of Polygars who rose against the British in the subsequent war.

It was to this man that the British dispatched the messenger Angre Kethi — a man whom Naicker decided to make an example of.

The spot of the hanging, known as “Thookupuliamara Thottam”, was long known locally, but it recently made wider news when an archaeologist discovered a stone inscription at the messenger’s memorial attesting the name and date of the hanging.

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1975: Sisowath Sirik Matak, Cambodian prince

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On this date in 1975, Sisowath Sirik Matak was executed with his aides by the Khmer Rouge.

As a young royal in French-administered Cambodia, Sirik Matak had had a shot to be selected as king in 1941. Instead, that dignity went to Norodom Sihanouk — and with it, Sihanouk would later charge, Sirik Matak’s lifelong resentment.

Sihanouk the “god-king” dominated the ensuing decades of Cambodian politics, and he kept Sirik Matak well away from domestic influence throughout the 1960s by shunting him off to a series of overseas diplomatic appointments. But the arch-conservative Sirik Matak’s longtime ally Lon Nol became Prime Minister in 1969 and took Sirik Matak on as his chief aide.

Sihanouk’s complex political career had by this time seen him abdicate the kingship as well as the Prime Ministership. Now he was head of state under the title “Prince” but by the end of the Sixties his power was faltering: an alliance with China yielded little as that country navigated the turbulent Cultural Revolution, while the Vietnam War next door fed into a Cambodian Civil War, too. (Sihanouk permitted the North Vietnamese to use bases in Cambodia.)

On March 18, 1970, Lon Nol deposed Prince Sihanouk in a bloodless coup — but it was Sirik Matak who orchestrated the move. There’s even an account that says Sirik Matak forced a wavering Lon Nol at gunpoint to go through with it.

The United States strongly supported the regime change, which was not exactly a portent of its success. Prince Sihanouk might be gone, but he did not take Cambodia’s civil conflict with him; arguably, his ouster intensified it, for Sihanouk was far more popular with the peasantry than the new, Washington-backed leaders. The existing secret bombing campaign the U.S. was directing at North Vietnamese refuges in Cambodia vastly intensified, becoming a campaign against the Khmer Rouge that outlasted the Vietnam War itself. Tens of thousands of people died under those bombs, and millions more were made refugees — and the insurgency only multiplied.

The impact of this bombing, the subject of much debate for the past three decades, is now clearer than ever. Civilian casualties in Cambodia drove an enraged populace into the arms of an insurgency that had enjoyed relatively little support until the bombing began, setting in motion the expansion of the Vietnam War deeper into Cambodia, a coup d’etat in 1970, the rapid rise of the Khmer Rouge, and ultimately the Cambodian genocide … the very domino effect that the Vietnam War was supposed to prevent …

[T]he bombs drove ordinary Cambodians into the arms of the Khmer Rouge, a group that seemed initially to have slim prospects of revolutionary success. Pol Pot himself described the Khmer Rouge during that period as “fewer than five thousand poorly armed guerrillas … scattered across the Cambodian landscape, uncertain about their strategy, tactics, loyalty, and leaders.”

Years after the war ended, journalist Bruce Palling asked Chhit Do, a former Khmer Rouge officer, if his forces had used the bombing as anti-American propaganda. Chhit replied:

Every time after there had been bombing, they would take the people to see the craters, to see how big and deep the craters were, to see how the earth had been gouged out and scorched…. The ordinary people sometimes literally shit in their pants when the big bombs and shells came. Their minds just froze up and they would wander around mute for three or four days. Terrified and half crazy, the people were ready to believe what they were told. It was because of their dissatisfaction with the bombing that they kept on co-operating with the Khmer Rouge, joining up with the Khmer Rouge, sending their children off to go with them…. Sometimes the bombs fell and hit little children, and their fathers would be all for the Khmer Rouge.

–Ben Kiernan and Taylor Owen*

Within a few years, the capital fell to the growing insurgency. The U.S. offered asylum to the leaders of Cambodia’s collapsing government; many accepted it, but many others refused. Preferring near-certain execution at the hands of the Khmer Rouge (his name was already published on the movement’s list of “seven traitors”) Sisowath Sirik Matak reproached his U.S. patrons in a letter to the American ambassador declining evacuation.

Dear Excellency and friend,

I thank you very sincerely for your letter and for your offer to transport me towards freedom. I cannot, alas, leave in such a cowardly fashion.

As for you and in particular for your great country, I never believed for a moment that you would have this sentiment of abandoning a people which has chosen liberty. You have refused us your protection and we can do nothing about it. You leave us and it is my wish that you and your country will find happiness under the sky.

But mark it well that, if I shall die here on the spot and in my country that I love, it is too bad because we are all born and must die one day. I have only committed the mistake of believing in you, the Americans.

Please accept, E

Just days into the Khmer Rouge’s occupation of Phnom Penh, the Communists forced the French embassy to hand over Sirik Matak and a number of aides who had taken temporary refuge there. They were summarily executed (apparently by shooting) at the old Cercle Sportif swimming pool — a site that has since become the location of the new U.S. embassy.

* Taylor Owen has mapped the known U.S. bombing sorties into Cambodia; he discusses that project, and the ways the bombing impacted the Khmer Rouge, here.

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1793: Philibert Francois Rouxel de Blanchelande, governor of Saint-Domingue

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On this date in 1793, Philibert Francois Rouxel de Blanchelande was guillotined in Paris — victim of two revolutions an ocean apart.

Blanchelande (English Wikipedia entry | French) was a comfortable henchmen of the ancien regime, descended of a marshal.

At the outbreak of the French Revolution, Blanchelande was the governor of the Caribbean sugar colony of Saint-Domingue.

Like other New World colonies, Saint-Domingue’s brutal slave plantations generated vast wealth for the grand blancs, a tiny white oligopoly which was massively outnumbered by its black servile chattel. The demographics made for a perpetual source of conflict and danger — but that was the price of doing business for Europe’s sweet tooth.

The promised liberte, egalite, fraternite of 1789 fell into this tinderbox like a torch.

By 1791, slaves were in full rebellion. Mirabeau had once said that Saint-Domingue’s masters “slept at the foot of Vesuvius”; when it exploded, Blanchelande fell into the caldera with the grand blancs. The slave rebellion quickly overran the western third of Saint-Domingue — the germ of the imminent Republic of Haiti. But the situation on the ground in the early 1790s was extremely fluid, and perilous from the French perspective: Great Britain lurked at nearby Jamaica, scheming to swipe the lucrative island away from its rival amid the chaos. So here Britain accepted Saint-Domingue’s white refugees, and there she treated with black rebels to grant their emancipation in exchange for their allegiance.

The old royal hand Blanchelande was impotent to control the cataclysm with only a handful of troops, and he must have looked increasingly antiquated by the rapid progress of the Revolution too. A 1792 relief force of 6,000 soldiers arrived bearing word of the National Assembly’s too-little-too-late grant of political rights to free blacks, and bearing also Blanchelande’s replacement: a Girondin envoy named Leger-Felicite Sonthonax.

Both these steps were also swiftly overrun by the eruption. Blanchelande returned to Paris and was forgettably guillotined as a counterrevolutionary on April 15, 1793, not long after France and Britain officially went to war. “For losing Saint-Domingo,” Carlyle says a bit dismissively, and maybe that’s even right. But if so the loss reounded to the glory of the Jacobins. The Revolution’s ideals would soon come to mesh with the pragmatics of maintaining the allegiance of Saint-Domingue.

On February 4, 1794 — 16 Pluviose Year II, if you like the revolutionary calendar — the National Convention thrilled to “launch liberty into the colonies” (Danton) with a momentous proclamation abolishing slavery throughout the empire.

Slavery of the blacks is abolished in all the colonies … all men living in the colonies, without distinction of color, are French citizens and enjoy all the rights guaranteed by the constitution.


“Les Mortels sont égaux, ce n’est pas la naissance c’est la seule vertu qui fait la différence…” (Via).

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1859: The martyrs of Tacubaya

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On this date, the conservative Mexican Gen. Leonardo Marquez earned himself the nickname “Tiger of Tacubaya” for the mass execution of liberal prisoners after a battle in Mexico’s Reform War.

The “reform” warred-over is actually the label for a whole era of liberal modernization with all the usual stuff to enrage a conservative old guard: land reform, a liberal constitution, and a rollback in the prerogatives of the clergy and the military.

It was rather sucessful.

The liberals successfully deposed General Santa Anna* and set about implementing this stuff. You, clever reader, have already surmised from the existence of a “Reform War” that they did not do so without resistance.

In the late 1850s, Mexico actually sported two rival presidents — Benito Juarez, under the liberals’ 1857 constitution, and Gen. Miguel Miramon, under a rebellious military junta that rejected this constitution.

One of the conservatives’ top commanders was Leonardo Marquez, our Tiger of Tacubaya: so called because at that ancient village, today engulfed in the sprawl of Mexico City, Marquez defeated a liberal army in a bloody fight.

Beginning that very night, Marquez had all his prisoners executed,** not excepting the wounded, foreign nationals, medical personnel, and even civilians sympathetic to the losing side. U.S. President James Buchanan denounced this affair to Congress in 1859 as evidence of the “wretched state” of Mexico that, he said, demanded American intervention.†

To cap the climax, after the battle of Tacubaya, in April, 1859, General Marquez ordered three citizens of the United States, two of them physicians, to be seized in the hospital at that place, taken out and shot, without crime, and without trial. This was done, notwithstanding our unfortunate countrymen were at the moment engaged in the holy cause of affording relief to the soldiers of both parties who had been wounded in the battle, without making any distinction between them.

Congress demurred on warmongering, but this act of wanton cruelty towards the so-called Martires de Tacubaya helped to turn Mexicans against the conservatives. The liberals had won the Reform War by the first days of 1861 — just in time to brace for that year’s ill-fated French intervention.

* Of Alamo fame, for yanquis; Santa Anna’s loss of Texas to the United States did no favors for his political position back home.

** One notable victim: writer Juan Díaz Covarrubias.

Marquez said he was ordered to carry out the summary executions by Miramon, but Marquez also had a reputation for ruthlessness apart from the incident at hand. Miramon got his a few years later when he was shot by the victorious constitutionalists alongside Emperor Maximilian, a later French-backed interloper not yet on the scene in 1859.

† Buchanan also cited the hanging of Ormond Chase in this same speech.

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1813: Albrecht Ludwig von Berger and Christian Daniel von Finckh, Oldenburgers

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On this date in 1813, the Napoleonic forces occupying Oldenburg, Germany shot Albrecht Ludwig von Berger and Christian Daniel von Finckh as rebels.

The Duchy of Oldenburg in northwest Germany could date its history back to the 12th century — but the end of its run was Napoleon’s takeover in 1810. This action helped break up France’s tenuous arrangement with Russia and lead to continental war, because the tsar’s sister was married to the Duke of Oldenburg. Russia had gone so far as to write Oldenburg’s sovereignty into its treaty with Napoleon.

The ultimate knock-on effects included France’s disastrous invasion of Russia and the collapse of Napoleon’s army.

As we meet Oldenburg in 1813, the French are headed the other way, harried by a vast European coalition. While the overall arc of this war bends towards French retreat, the situation at any given time and place was unpredictable, and Napoleon often gave better than he got.

Such uncertain circumstances offer martyrdom to the unlikeliest of characters. Berger and Finckh were just bureaucratic types, respectable figures in their own day whose peers’ bones presently molder unattended in the forlorn appendices of especially thorough genealogists.

But at a momentary nadir of French authority in Oldenburg in March 1813, local risings and the threat of Russian cavalry temporarily put the French administration to flight — leaving in its place a temporary administrative commission to which both Berger and Finckh belonged.

Had Oldenburg immediately fallen to the Sixth Coalition, that item would be a footnote to a treatise on governance in the duchy. Instead, the French regained authority and decided that our two principals were a little too subversively enthusiastic about running Oldenburg sans France. The notoriously hard-hearted commander Dominique Vandamme had them condemned at a court-martial on April 9, and the sentence put to execution the very next day. (The other commissioners got off with prison sentences.)

Little more than a year later, the two were posthumously rehabilitated by the restored dynasty of the post-French Grand Duchy of Oldenburg. Though minor figures in the scheme of things, every martyr pays the same coin; accordingly, the patriotic German might wish to spare a moment for the memorial to them in Oldenburg’s historic Gertrudenfriedhof cemetery.


Memorial to Berger and Finckh at Gertrudenfriedhof in Oldenburg, Germany. (cc) image from Corradox.

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1571: James Hamilton, Archbishop of St. Andrews and uncle of a crack shot

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On this date in 1571, the Archbishop of St. Andrews hanged in his clerical vestments at the Mercat Cross in Stirling.

John Hamilton‘s fate was tied up in that of his Romish church during the strife-wearied years of Queen Mary. There was a sure reckoning for the Church due in those years, but whose?

After the transition in England from the Catholic Queen Mary to the Protestant Queen Elizabeth, an alliance of Protestant Scottish nobles moved to overthrow the authority Mary of Guise, the French Catholic who ruled Scotland as regent for her expatriate daughter Mary, Queen of Scots.

As she was pushed back, Mary of Guise called in French reinforcements, and the Protestant lords English reinforcements. But Mary of Guise dropped dead of dropsy in 1560 and put the Protestants in the driver’s seat, shattering Scotland’s centuries-long Auld Alliance with France.

Political maneuvering in Scotland over the next decade makes for a tangled skein with many unexpected accommodations and alliances. But the religious direction of the realm would be the knottiest thread of them all.

James Stuart, Earl of Moray, one of the most prominent Protestant lords, was the illegitimate half-brother of Mary, Queen of Scots — Mary of Guise’s very Catholic daughter, who soon returned to rule a native land she had not laid eyes upon since the age of five.* The practical Moray became at first the real power behind the throne of the teenage queen, but the two also increasingly maneuvered against one another for, among other things, the future of Scottish Christianity.

The prelate Hamilton naturally held for out to keep reforms within the pale of orthodoxy. He had printed a noteworthy “Hamilton’s catechism” of Catholic doctrine in the 1550s, in the vernacular for popular consumption.**

So as the Moray-Mary relationship went pear-shaped in the late 1560s and the country fell into civil war, Hamilton of course gravitated to the side of the Catholic queen. Mary by this time had been forced to abdicate the throne in favor of her son, James VI (eventually also James I of England). Moray was now “Regent Moray” and exercised power in the infant king’s name. He also drove Mary to England, and her eventual execution.

He certainly had no shortage of mortal enemies.

On January 23, 1570, from the window of a house Archbishop Hamilton owned with his brother in Linlithgow, their kinsman James Hamilton shot Regent Moray dead as he passed in a procession en route to a diplomatic rendezvous in Edinburgh.†


James Hamilton prepares to win your barstool bet by becoming the first firearm assassin in history on January 23, 1570. (via)

This appears to be the first assassination with firearm on record (beating William the Silent‘s murder by a good 14 years), and it would set an encouraging precedent for Team Assassin: the gunman sprang onto a ready-saddled horse and successfully escaped his pursuers by desperately daggering his own mount in the hindquarters to spur it to leap over a creek. James Hamilton took refuge with others of the Hamilton clan in the town of that name.

As his subsequent course suggests, James Hamilton was not a lone gunman: a number of family members knew of and aided his plot. (He had actually been stalking Moray over several cities on his travels, looking for the right opportunity.)

Through them, the killer escaped to France. His uncle the archbishop was not so fortunate.

John Hamilton fled to the refuge of Dumbarton Castle following the assassination, but this citadel loyal to Mary was taken by surprise at the start of April 1571 by a daring nighttime escalade. John Hamilton was captured there and hailed to Stirling, where he was put to immediate death without benefit of trial.

* It was a bit of a step down from the French court for Mary, who had briefly been Queen consort of France when her frail husband unexpectedly succeeded the throne following the death of Henri II in a joust.

** Also in the 1550s, Bishop Hamilton granted the townspeople of St Andrew perpetual access to its Old Course, the legendary birthplace of golf.

† Two other short-lived regents succeeded Regent Moray until in 1572 the post fell to the hands of James Douglas, Earl of Morton.

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1901: Filipino insurgents on Luzon

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The American occupation of the Philippines from 1899 spawned a widespread indigenous resistance whose “hatred of our people is as bitter as it is groundless,” one American general puzzled.

Not all Americans saw it that way. William Jennings Bryan‘s populist magazine The Commoner slagged the U.S. Army for its liberal use of “the methods best calculated to give them new reasons for hating us.”


Cartoon on the cover of Life magazine’s May 22, 1902 issue (click for larger image) shows colonial European powers chortling, ‘Those pious Yankees can’t throw stones at us any more’ as they watch Americans apply the water cure to a Filipino captive. Torture by water cure was widespread during the Philippines-American War.

“The native is tied down flat on the ground and his mouth forced open with sticks or a string,” one soldier described it (pdf source; it’s on page 23). “Water is poured down his throat through a bamboo tube, which is nearly always handy. The native must drink the stuff, and it is poured down him until he can hold no more. As much as a gallon can be forced into a man that way. Then the water is pumped out of him by stamping on his stomach or rolling him over. When he comes to the native is always ready to talk.”

Apart from guerrillas in the field, Filipino insurgents opposed the occupiers’ superior firepower with the nasty asymmetrical tactics of assassination and terrorism, and that’s what brings us to today’s post.

Filipino terrorists known as Ducots, Mandoducots, or Sandathan on August 28, 1900 murdered a wealthy Los Banos landowner named Honorato Quisumbing who served as a town “presidente” under the American occupation.

A U.S. military court found that nine prisoners at the bar (in combination with “other natives whose names are unknown”) made “an assault upon the said Honorato Quisumbing with clubs, knives, bolos, and daggers, and did then and there wilfully, feloniously, and with malice aforethought kill and murder the said Honorato Quisumbing by striking, cutting, and stabbing the said Honorato Quisumbing with the said clubs, knives, bolos, and daggers.”

The decedent was a Visayan doing business as a merchant at Santa Cruz and Los Banos … formerly loyal to the Spanish Government and transferred his loyalty, active assistance, and cordial good will to the succeeding Government of the United States … Because of his friendshipfor, and willingness to aid, the forces of the United States, he was made a marked man, and the order went forth from the insurgent chiefs that he should be secured, dead or alive; and, as the sequel shows, a money reward was offered for his life.

General Arthur MacArthur — father of World War II General Douglas MacArthur — commuted four of the sentences to prison terms, and approved the remaining five executions for April 5, 1901.

Honorato Quisumbing’s widow was compensated by American authorities to the tune of $1,500. One of the victim’s seven sons, Eduardo, grew up to become his country’s leading botanist.

Further north on Luzon that same date, the pueblo of Mexico witnessed the hanging of insurgent captain Isabello del Rosario, also by authority of the American military government.

He’d been convicted of various depredations as what his prosecutors called “a notorious outlaw,” the most shocking of which was buring alive a man who had been reported to have made suspicious inquiries as to the whereabouts of the guerrillas. (He was also convicted of rape, extortion, and the most egregious war crime, fighting out of uniform.)

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1905: An unknown spy in the Russo-Japanese War

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In the late 1890s and early 1900s, Russia’s imperial ambitions in the east drew it inexorably towards conflict with Japan. This was the period when Russia began constructing the continent-spanning Trans-Siberian Railway linking Moscow to the Pacific port of Vladivostok.

Russian troops came right along with the rails.

On the pretext of protecting its construction gangs, Russian troops occupied Manchuria — and the weakened Chinese Qing dynasy couldn’t do much about it.

But the Japanese could.

Manchuria and Korea (which Russia’s presence also threatened) Tokyo conceived as her sphere of influence. The rising hegemon in East Asia would serve notice in the 1904-1905 Russo-Japanese War that it had now to be reckoned among the world’s great powers.

The decisive land battle in this conflict was the Battle of Mukden, February 20 through March 10, 1905 — a gigantic engagement involving more than 600,000 troops.

In it, Japan cleaned the Russian clock.

The defeat sent a shattered Russian army on a disordered retreat north, to the city of Tieling. The Japanese followed in hot pursuit, so defensive regrouping became impossible and within a couple of days the Russians abandoned Tieling, too.

“We are everywhere driving the Russians before us to Kaiyuan,” gloated an official Japanese telegram of Thursday, March 16.

The underwhelming Russian general Aleksey Kuropatkin was there just long enough to get word that Moscow had relieved him of command. By Saturday, March 18, Kaiyuan too was in Japanese hands.*

So it was likely on or about this date in 1905 that a handful of those Japanese forces harrying the Russian flight paused on the outskirts of Kaiyuan to behead an alleged spy.

If this individual’s name is known, I have not been able to locate it — but small wonder. In the charnel house of Russia’s catastrophic defeat, the dead were too numerous to bury.

After Mukden, there would not be many more. It was the last major land battle, and after Japan followed it up with a crushing naval victory that May, hostilities came to a close.


“On the Hills of Manchuria”, a mournful 1906 waltz by Ilya Shatrov.

* The pursuit didn’t last much longer; Japanese forces were themselves too battered and exhausted from the Battle of Mukden.

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1865: Amy Spain, liberation anticipation

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This date in 1865, just weeks before the final collapse of the Confederacy, a slave named Amy was hanged on a sycamore tree before the courthouse of Darlingon, S.C., for anticipating her liberty a little too exuberantly.

Mopping up after his march to the sea, Union Gen. William T. Sherman proceeded to South Carolina. After occuping the capital, Columbia, Sherman’s army made a northerly progression towards North Carolina.

In early March, Union Cavalry appeared in Darlington. Our 17-year-old principal, the domestic of a local lawyer named A.C. Spain,* exulted at this arrival.

“Bless the Lord, the Yankees have come!” Harper’s Weekly** would later report her to have exclaimed.

The long night of darkness which had bound her in slavery was about to break away. It was impossible to repress the exuberance of her feelings; and although powerless to aid the advancing deliverers of her caste, or to injure her oppressors, the simple expression of satisfaction at the event sealed her doom.

But the Union men were not long for the town. It was just a scout party; constrained by strategic objectives, and hindered by swollen early-spring rivers, the main body of Union forces passed Darlington by.

Anticipating an occupation that was not about to occur, Amy recklessly declared herself free and took some of the Spain household’s possessions — the fruit of her own involuntary labor. Whatever her exact actions in those days, they were frightfully punished — over the objection of A.C. Spain himself, who reportedly served as her advocate at the rebel military trial that condemned her.

Her persecutors will pass away and be forgotten, but Amy Spain’s name is now hallowed among the Africans, who, emancipated and free, dare, with the starry folds of the flag of the free floating over them, speak her name with holy reverence.

-Harper’s Weekly

* Spain was also a Confederate commissioner to Arkansas at the start of the Civil War, in which capacity he successfully urged Arkansas into the rebel camp.

** Septemer 30, 1865.

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