Silas Soule, Lawrence Kansas

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silas_Soule



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Immortal_Ten
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"The Immortal Ten", Lawrence, Kansas Territory, 1859. Standing, from left to right: Major James B. Abbott, Captain Joshua A. Pike, Jacob Senix, Joseph Gardner, Thomas Simmons, S.J. Willis, Charles Doy, Captain John E. Stuart [Stewart], Silas Soule, and George R. Hay. Seated in front: Dr. John Doy")
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"Silas Stillman Soule (July 26, 1838 – April 23, 1865) was an American abolitionist, Kansas Territory Jayhawker, anti-slavery militant, and a friend of John Brown and Walt Whitman.

Later, during the American Civil War, he joined the Colorado volunteers, rising to the rank of Captain in the Union Army.

Silas Soule was in command of Company D, 1st Colorado Cavalry, which was present at Sand Creek on November 29, 1864, when he refused an order to join the Sand Creek massacre.

During the subsequent inquiry, Soule testified against the massacre's commanding officer, John Chivington, and soon after, he was murdered in Denver."

"Silas Soule was born into a family of abolitionists in Bath, Maine. He was raised in Maine and Massachusetts and, in 1854, his family became part of the newly formed New England Emigrant Aid Company, an organization whose goal was to help settle the Kansas Territory and bring it into the Union as a free state.

His father and brother arrived in Kansas, near Lawrence (of which the Soule family was one of the founding families), in November 1854. Silas, his mother and two sisters came the following summer.

Shortly after the family's arrival at Coal Creek, a few miles south of Lawrence near present-day Vinland, Amasa Soule, Silas's father, established his household as a stop on the Underground Railroad.

 At the young age of 17, Silas was escorting slaves, escapees from Missouri, north to freedom."

"On November 29, 1864, Captain Soule and his company were with the regiment at Sand Creek, Colorado. A fellow abolitionist, Colonel John Chivington, ordered the cavalry to attack Black Kettle's encampment of Cheyenne and Arapaho there.

Soule saw that the Cheyenne were flying the Union flag as a sign of peace, and, when told to attack, he and Lieutenant Joseph Cramer ordered their men to hold their fire and stay put.

Most of Chivington's other forces, however, attacked the camp. The resulting action became known as the Sand Creek massacre, one of the most notorious acts of mass murder in the United States history.

 Soule described what followed in a letter to his former commanding officer and friend, Major Edward W. Wynkoop:"

""I refused to fire, and swore that none but a coward would, for by this time hundreds of women and children were coming towards us, and getting on their knees for mercy. 

I tell you Ned it was hard to see little children on their knees have their brains beat out by men professing to be civilized. ... I saw two Indians hold one of another's hands, chased until they were exhausted, when they kneeled down, and clasped each other around the neck and were both shot together. 

They were all scalped, and as high as half a dozen taken from one head. They were all horribly mutilated.

 One woman was cut open and a child taken out of her, and scalped. ... Squaw's snatches were cut out for trophies. You would think it impossible for white men to butcher and mutilate human beings as they did there"


The massacre sparked outrage and shock around the country. 

The Army began an investigation into the "battle", and Soule formally testified against Chivington in a court of inquiry in January 1865. 

His testimony about the events at Sand Creek led, in part, to Congress refusing the Army's request for thousands of men for a general war against the Plains Indians"