On this date in 1862, Private Samuel H. Calhoun of the 2nd Kentucky Infantry was executed by the Union Army in Bardstown, Kentucky, for murdering a local farmer.
(Calhoun had previously killed the farmer’s pig, and the farmer had Calhoun arrested. So this was settling the score.)
“I shall pass away, the moral wreck of a degenerate age,” he signed off in his published confession, dictated to Jonathan Harrington Green. “Adieu.”
If the confession is to be believed the farmer was just the last of maybe dozens of Calhoun’s victims, slain remorselessly everywhere from North Carolina to Mexico over the preceding years. But is this unverifiable
Read on for the full story in a post at Civil War Medicine guest-authored by one of our favorite crime-history bloggers, Robert Wilhelm of Murder by Gaslight.
On this day..
- 2013: Abdullah Fandi Al-Shammary, long time coming
- 1803: Antonio Lavagnini, impiccato e squartato
- 1892: A day in the death penalty around Kentucky
- 1717: Anna Maria Wagemann, the last witch burned at Fürfeld
- 1886: Dennis Dilda
- 1601: Starina Novak, hajduk
- 1999: Leo Echegaray, by lethal injection in the Philippines
- 10 executions that defined the 1970s
- 1860: John Guthrie, antislavery horse thief
- Feast Day of St. Agatha
- 1945: Denise Bloch, Lilian Rolfe and Violette Szabo
- 1894: Auguste Vaillant, bomb-throwing anarchist
- 1597: The 26 Martyrs of Japan, for God and trade routes