Truth Deferred: The National Guard Massacre

The riot seals the fate of convicted killers Joe Palmer, William McHugh, and the accused Avondale murderers. People want vengeance, and all these men will leave the jail dead, although Allen Ingalls has one final life to take, and he will leave haunting questions about how many people he murdered before the Taylor family after he is gone. While Berner does prison time, Palmer gets the dubious dist...

Years later, as Will Taft is on a meteoric rise through the ranks towards US President and Supreme Court Justice, he reveals that all he learned from the Cincinnati National Guard Massacre was that when the working class rise up in protest, soldiers need to mow them down in the streets. But in 1884, the last chance to hold any of the people responsible for the massacre accountable is squandered by...

Although only one of them is a huge public spectacle, the first week of April is full of funerals. As dozens of dead are buried, finger-pointing begins. There will be three public inquiries, and William Howard Taft becomes the bulldog for both a Special Grand Jury and a Cincinnati Bar Association investigation into T.C. Campbell. For personal and partisan reasons, the National Guard and all the pu...

On Saturday morning, a remarkable number of citizens are dead, but the prisoners have all been saved. Some believe that the trouble has passed, but Sheriff Hawkins disagrees, and he begs Ohio Governor Hoadly to send as many National Guard troops as possible. Hoadly’s indecisiveness squanders critical time, and when the first reinforcements finally arrive and Hoadly is frantically sending every mem...

As a comically stupid plan to sneak Berner to prison unravels, affluent Cincinnatians call a mass meeting, where speakers praise lynchings in nearby towns and whip the crowd into a frenzy. Afterward, people start marching to the jail. As the crowd grows to thousands, people grab battering rams, sledgehammers, and nooses, intent on breaking down the doors and hanging the accused killers inside. Des...

Before the "boy murderer" goes to trial, newspapers inflame the city with a non-existent crime wave. Prosecutor Pugh rejects an offer to plead Berner guilty to 2nd degree murder, and the public is told that if this 17-year-old defendant isn’t hanged, every citizen will be a future target. But jurors hear a more nuanced and complicated story, creating a dangerous divide between the people who hear...

When two body snatchers commit a triple homicide so barbaric that it shocks the nation, Cincinnatians grow more alarmed that the laws of human decency are coming untethered and that the legal system is no longer protecting them from falling victim to incredible violence. We also explore the recent, prolific history of lynchings to see how the public views its options.   

William Kirk was a horse trader with too many wives, an unlikely man to become a rallying cry for a city, but when he is brutally killed on Christmas Eve, and one of the accused “boy murderers” hires the venerated T.C. Campbell to defend him, a murder trial becomes a public litmus test for the entire justice system.

The heartless crime and multiple murder trials of “Crazy Joe” Payton introduce us to the morally pliable brilliance of attorney T.C. Campbell, his odd political alliance with The Cincinnati Enquirer , and his blood feud with the Commercial Gazette and a young, idealistic lawyer named William Howard Taft – personal animosities that will help re-write history.

Our story starts on Monday, March 31, 1884. The streets are covered in blood. Over 50 people are dead and some are dying in the hallways of the hospital. Every window has been smashed out of the jail, and the county courthouse is a smoldering ruin. To find out how we got here, we travel back to an imperfect love story ending in a public murder, and how the case of William McHugh illustrates a grow...

Season One of Truth Deferred: The National Guard Massacre takes listeners through a series of grisly murders, into the minds of a public whipped into a lynch mob, and explains how it all ended in the largest slaughter of unarmed civilians by National Guard troops in U.S. history. Just as shockingly, hosts Mike and Amy Morgan reveal how the truth of these events was so successfully whitewashed that...