AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY.

Westport Times, Volume V, Issue 845, 3 August 1871, Page 3

AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY.

A correspondent at Ealeigb, North Carolina, reports a dreadful outrage on a family in Morgan county. He says : —Silas Weston, a free negro before the war, has for many years been living with Polly Steadman, a white woman. Polly has or had four children, white, the eldest about 14, the youngest nearly two years of age. Silas and Polly lived peaceably together, and were in better circumstances than most of their class. Some time ago three notorious characters—Govanand Columbus Adair and M. Bernard—were charged with the theft of a quantity of brandy and bound over at M'Dowell county court. Silas had seen the thieves carrying off the booty, and was subposnaed as the principal witness for the prosecution. The Adairs threatened his life if hepeached, but Silas expressed a determination to bring the rogues to justice. On Wednesday evening, April 26, shortly after nightfall, while the family were preparing to retire to peaceful repose, the dog began to bark violently. Polly, looking through the chinks between the Jogs, received a pistol bullet in the eye. With a wild scream she sprang back, and at that instant the door was broken down, and in rushed the Adairs and Bernard, firing as they came. Silas fell dead, with two balls in the head. One of the assassins stood oyer the children as they lay upon the floor shooting them through the head like so many«pigs. Polly stooped to creep under the bed, but was flung back. Then she began to fight like a tigress. One of the butchers attacked her with a knife. Finally, with five deep cuts on the body, with her throat deeply gashed and a pistol shot through the eye, this poor creature sank to the floor, and was kicked into a pile of broom straw. Meanwhile every voice in the family had been stilled. Six lifeless bodies lay on the bloody floor —the old man on the hearth, the mother haggled in pieces on the straw, and the children in their nightclothes, lying where they fell. The fiends contemplated their work, to make sure it had been done thoroughly, and prepared to hide their tracks. Piling up clothing, straw, and other combustible matter, they applied the match, and then fled away into the darkness. And now occurred what may well sound marvellous. Polly Steadman, scorched by the flames, arouses herself, seizes her youngest child, who gives signs of life, and, crawling to the door, contrived to reach a house in the neighbourhood, and before she died made a deposition, upon which the assassins were arrested.