Jury Acquits 16 Mexicans of Columbus Raid Murders
So read the headlines of the New York Times on this day in 1921.
This is an aspect of the raid, which started off the day by day habit here, i.e., posts in "real time", a century removed, that we still haven't broken. We probably should have considered it before.
Villa declared the raid a success in that his forces took over 300 longarms, 80 horses, and 30 mules, from Columbus and Camp Furlong by way of the raid. While that may be so, he directly lost 90 to 170 dead, thereby paying a steep price for low returns it its considered that the raiding force had been made up of 484 men. Sixty-three of his men were killed during the raid and the remainder died of their wounds thereafter, explaining the imprecise tally.
Some were captured and tried rapidly, with six being sentenced to death.
Other captured men, however were tried later on with differing result, but the overall results are, unfortunately, quite unclear to me. It hadn't occurred to me that any were tried at all, as I would have regarded Villa's army as that, an army, albeit an irregular one. Prisoners from armies aren't tried and aren't executed for simply participating in a military action, irrespective of the action itself being illegal.
Indeed, that logic later caused at least one prisoner to have a death sentence commuted to a life sentence. But there were at least three trials and many of the men tried were those who had been taken prisoner by the Army following the launching of its expedition into Mexico. As far as I can tell, some death sentences were carried out. A shocking number of the prisoners simply died in captivity due to the horrible condition, in part, of the county jail in which they were held. We have to recall here that the 1918 Flu Epidemic was ongoing.
As things moved along there came to be a fair amount of sympathy for the prisoners, some of whom were in bad physical shape, and many of whom had only vague connections with what had occurred. Soldier witnesses for the trial ended up being deployed to France so conducting the trials became difficult. One defendant was only twelve years old and was released.
Other than the citation to this headline, I can't find any evidence of trials occurring as late as 1921, but apparently they did. By this time, it was probably too late to really convict many. In this trial, apparently there were twenty defendants, and sixteen were found not guilty by the jury.
Should any have been tried at all?
Well, some appear to have been tried because of direct murders of civilians, something that's illegal in any war. That's another matter. But the wisdom of trying soldiers, at least one of whom was a conscripted Carranzaista who was sent into action on that day without ammunition, is and was questionable. What to do with them no doubt was also problematic, something we've learned again in recent years due to our wars with the Taliban and Al Queda.
On this same day President Harding, who seems to have been photographed with visitors nearly every day, posed with Pop Anson and Anson's daughters. Adrian "Pop" Anson had been a professional baseball player and later a vaudeville performer. In his vaudeville role, he performed with his two daughters depicted here, Adele and Dorothy. Anson would have been about 68 at the time this photograph was taken, and both of his daughters were in their 30s. Anson died the following April at age 69.
The dog was Laddie Boy, an Airedale. He was the first White House dog to be followed by the press. He wasn't even one year old when photographed here, and would outlive his master.
