Murder of Miss M'Crea

MURDER OF MISS M'CREA.

General Gates complains to General Burgoyne of this and other outrages in the following words:- "A young lady, Miss M'Crea, lovely to the sight, of virtuous character and amiable disposition, engaged to be married to an officer in your army, was, with other women and children, taken out of a house near Fort Edward, carried into the woods, and there scalped and mangled in the most shocking manner. Two parents, with their six children, were all treated with the same inhumanity, while quietly residing in their own happy and peaceful dwellings. The miserable fate of Miss M'Crea was peculiarly aggravated by her being dressed to receive her promised husband-but met her murderer, employed by you. Upwards of one hundred men, women, and children, have perished by the hands of ruffians, to whom it is asserted you have paid the price of blood." This appears since to be rather an exaggerated charge. In General Burgoyne's reply, he says :-"The fact was no premeditated barbarity; on the contrary, two chiefs who had brought Miss M'Crea off, for the purpose of security, not of violence to her person, disputed which should be her guard, and in a fit of savage passion in the one from whose hands she was snatched, the unhappy woman became the victim." He expresses sorrow and regret for the tragic scenes, and further states that he obliged the Indians to give up the murderer into his hands, and he certainly should have suffered an ignominious death, had he not been convinced that a pardon on his terms would be more efficacious than an execution, to prevent further mischief. That he paid for scalps he denies; but the Indians were to receive compensation for prisoners. This cruel conduct of the royalists is contemplated with horror and detestation by all ranks of people, except their friends and adherents. It is impossible not to detest that cause and that army which accepts the aid of savage auxiliaries, and encourages them in inhuman slaughter and bloodshed. This measure was certainly countenanced and recommended by the king and his ministers, and General Burgoyne acknowledges that he allowed the Indians to take the scalps of the dead. It must be painful for the impartial historian to record, and it will require the strongest faith of the reader in future ages to credit, the disgraceful story, that Britons, who pride themselves on their civility and humanity, employed the wild savages of the wilderness in a war against a people united to them by the ties of consanguinity; that age, and the helpless invalid, women, and children at the breast, are all alike subjected to the merciless fury of barbarians; that British generals should be so regardless of the dignity of their station, and the voice of humanity, as to receive from the hands of these ferocious wretches the scalps torn from the skulls of innocent persons!