The American Board of Foreign Missions have done a good work in supplying the kindly and refining influences of the gospel to the savages of Asia and the islands of the sea, but let them forward no more missionaries to distant lands for the present. God knows they are needed at home. There are no meaner, mangier, filthier savages in all the wide domain of barbarism than the Christian town of Cohocton, right here at our elbow, can produce. Any one who read the letter of our Bath correspondent in yesterday’s EXPRESS will endorse that statement.
Cohocton is a place where virtue is so prized, by certain of the citizens who rank as human beings there, but would be regarded as swine in most places, that lately, when they suspected a Mr. Curtis of adultery with a Miss Dawson, school teacher, (albeit Mrs. Curtis herself had no such suspicion and was on friendly terms with Miss D.,) they went boldly, with blackened faces and at dead of night, and took the man and the woman from their beds, and——. But read Miss D.’s sworn testimony:
They carried me to the door and called to Mr. Curtis to come out; one said, “strip her”; I said, “O, don’t do that”; the first thing done was to tear off my dress and then my under garments; then they put tar on my head, and while I was screaming for my mother they put tar in my mouth; then they tarred my body, and put feathers on my head and body.
The men who did that deed are capable of doing any low, sneaking, cowardly villainy that could be invented in perdition. They are very bastards of the devil. By the evidence of their victim, their names are Seth Hill, Benjamin Henry, John Ferris, Eleazar Bently, Elmer Wheeler, and Thomas Jones. Mr. Curtis’ testimony adds the names of Adelbert Jones, Henry Hugenor, and Charles Ferris. If the farmers (for these are farmers) of Cohocton, are of this complexion, what on earth must a Cohocton “rough” be like?
It seems absurd to think of legal justice in Cohocton—the very suggestion of it is ludicrous—but still these cattle are actually to be tried for the crime they have committed. Hon. G. H. McMastin, County Judge, will preside at the trial at Bath, and we have a curiosity to know whether they will be applauded or punished. The former, without a doubt. The judge who should punish the most prominent and honored citizens of Cohocton for the daring act of stripping and tarring and feathering a helpless woman without waiting for the permission of the despised law and its despised officers, would be promptly tarred and feathered himself by the outraged public.
We await the result of the trial. Meantime, let the American Board send some missionaries to Cohocton—with a military escort. Our navy protects our missionaries in cannibal lands; therefore why should not our army protect them here? Cannibals are not so dangerous as Cohocton champions of chastity, because they are less sneaking and cowardly.
August 25, 1870