526 Sheet – American State Trials 1918 Volume X Leo Frank Document

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Here is the translated text as follows:

494 X, AMERICAN STATE TRIALS.

I am designed to prove to you that on the evening of the 8th of March, the town was in a general commotion. Vast numbers of people were seen coming from all parts of the town, armed with clubs and sticks of various sizes, and some with guns. They assembled at and near King Street; fire was cried, and the bells were rung to increase the collection. From all this, you might be induced to believe that there was a general design, in a great number of the inhabitants, to attack the soldiers. It was the inhabitants who began the disorders of the evening, and all the evils and mischiefs of it were the effects of their disorderly conduct.

However, if we recollect the evidence, we shall find that previous to all this collection, a number of soldiers had come out of their barracks, armed with clubs, bayonets, cutlasses, and instruments of diverse kinds. In the most disorderly and outrageous manner, they were ravaging the streets, assaulting everyone they met, and even running out of their way to assault and endanger the lives of some of the most peaceable inhabitants who were standing at their own doors. These inhabitants neither did nor said anything to provoke them. The soldiers even vented their inhumanity on a little boy of twelve years of age. Some of them were conspiring and threatening to blow up Liberty Tree in the same manner as had been lately done at New York; an account of which had just arrived.

Consider also the testimony of a Colonel and others, who declare the outrageous appearance, behavior, and threatening of the soldiers at other times and places the same evening. Consider those who give an account of the affray at Murray’s barracks, where eighteen or twenty soldiers rushed out with cutlasses, etc., attacking all who came in their way. They struck several persons and cut an oyster-man on the shoulder, of whose testimony we are deprived by reason of his absence. This was probably the beginning of the affair at the barracks, of which so much has been said. There are yet other witnesses to whose testimony I might refer, that you may consider in what light that transaction ought justly to be viewed; but I forbear.

The inhabitants, for a long time, had been fully sensible of...

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