Virginia born-and-bred Colonel William Crawford has the distinction of being one of the few people from the Old Dominion State to have a statue of them erected up North. But in an even rarer honor, an entire county in Ohio was named after the friend and neighbor of fellow Virginian George Washington.
Nonetheless, anarchists, historical revisionists and various other social justice snowflakes have taken it upon themselves to declare war on on long since dead white guys.
And by “declare war,” that means attempting to destroy physical evidence of their existence, Comrade Joe Stalin-style.
Case in point would be the decapitation of the life sized statue of Col. Crawford committed in the dark of night, and done in all places, on the grounds of the Crawford County Courthouse.
Revolutionary War hero Colonel Crawford statue decapitated at the Courthouse. The lawless attacks on our history must end! pic.twitter.com/rcEdvXWo2z
— Wes Goodman (@WesleyGoodman) August 25, 2017
As reported by Philip Wegmann of the Washington Examiner, “Apparently social justice vandals are decapitating Revolutionary War statues now”.
Tortured to death toward the end of the Revolutionary War, Col. William Crawford’s memory has only recently been desecrated. A marble statue of the pioneer soldier guarding the entrance of the Ohio Crawford County Courthouse was decapitated Thursday night.
Suspects remain unidentified and the vandals, at large. But there are virtue signaling bounties on the heads of historical monuments today and there are only so many motives for attacking inanimate objects. Regardless, whoever beheaded Crawford didn’t know him.
Known to history not only as a Colonial-era surveyor, but also early in life as a militiaman serving the British Crown during the very bloody French and Indian War. It was prior to his death that Crawford died in the fight for American independence from King George III.
Speaking of history and the French and Indian War, both Wegmann and the historians have noted that Colonial-era wars were infamous for the savage battles, atrocities and slasher movie-like amounts of blood that was shed by both sides.
And the treatment of non-combatants and prisoners of war alike was little better than barbaric, even by 18th century standards. As Wegmann cited;
Two hundred and thirty-five years ago, toward the end of the Revolution, Crawford led a 400-man mounted unit into Ohio in retaliation against British sponsored attacks against colonial pioneers. During an engagement with a combined Delaware [Indian tribe]-British force, the Americans were whipped, their little army was broken, and Crawford was captured.
Unfortunately for Crawford, the British-allied Delaware Indians were still furious at the Continentals for the massacre a year earlier of nearly a 100 of their brethren who had converted to Moravian Christianity and had embraced complete pacifism.
Unfortunately for the recent converts, the renegade Pennsylvania militiamen were convinced the Moravian Indians were party to earlier raiding parties that tortured and killed Pennsylvanian women and children.
Known then and now as the Gnadenhutten Massacre, the following is an unvarnished account of what happened before Col. Crawford even set foot in the Ohio territory;
However, the brutal frontier war was still raging, and in early March of 1782 a raiding party of 160 Pennsylvania militiamen under Colonel David Williamson set off to the Moravian towns to burn them in an effort to keep the abandoned villages from being used by war parties. Contrary to some apologists of Williamson’s raid, it was neither organized or sanctioned by any authority. It was an adhoc expedition formed by local frontiersmen who wanted to destroy the villages which they perceived as staging areas for Indian raids.
As the militia approached Gnadenhutten on March 7, they told the Christian Indians that they had come to protect them and remove them back to the safety of Fort Pitt. Once the Indians gathered together, and others from nearby Salem arrived, the militiamen instead accused them of taking part in the ongoing raids into Pennsylvania. Some articles of clothing taken from a massacred white family by a marauding war party and left behind at Gnadenhutten incited the passion of the militiamen. Although the Moravian Indians were well known as pacifists, and indeed had been invaluable to the American cause, the bordermen were out for Indian scalps and plunder.
Col. Williamson held a council of his men to determine whether to take the Indians back to Fort Pitt or to kill them. Records state that only 18 men voted to spare the Indians.
On the evening of the 7th, the Indians spent their last hours praying and singing, knowing that their spirits would soon be in the presence of their God. They did not resist, they did not struggle. The next morning the slaughter began. The women were killed in one building, the men in the other. The old, the young and the infants were all massacred. The lists of the victims contain the names of infants and toddlers who were killed. As the victims were brought into the slaughter houses, many sang hymns, others prayed. The word of God was on their lips as the mallet or tomahawk crashed into their skulls.
Nonetheless, due to at least some of the Pennsylvania militiamen responsible for the Gnadenhutten Massacre possibly being assigned to Col. Crawford’s command a year later, revisionist historians place the blame for the atrocities at Gnadenhutten directly on Crawford’s shoulders. As also cited by Wegmann;
Getting captured on the frontier was bad. Getting caught on the frontier by an Indian tribe that wrongly holds you responsible for the Moravian massacre, a slaughter of almost a hundred innocent Christian Indians, was even worse. An army surgeon, Dr. John Knight, recorded the colonel’s subsequent death.
Crawford was stripped naked. His ears were cut off. Then he was bound to a stake, covered in gunpowder, and summarily set on fire. “At this point of his sufferings,” the surgeon wrote, “[Crawford] besought the Almighty to have mercy on his soul, spoke very low, and bore his torments with the most manly fortitude.” It took him “an hour and three quarters” to burn to death.
