May 15, 1862
The Kind Of Men Fremont Hangs. - It has already been announced that Gen. Fremont has approved the verdict of the Court-Martial sentencing to be hung two Secession marauders, Henry Kuhl and Hamilton W. Windon, for the murder of a young man, not a soldier, attached to one of our camps in Braxton county, Va. The Kanawha Republican says:
Their victim had been working for a farmer for a few weeks, and was on his return to camp, and on his way stopped at Kuhl's house to rest. Mrs. Kuhl went to the meadow, where her husband and son and Windon were mowing, and told them that there was a Union soldier at the house. The murdered man was not a soldier. The elder Kuhl told her to back and tell the soldier to come out to the meadow to them. In the mean time his murder was decided upon by the elder Kuhl and Windon, the young Kuhl not consenting. When the young man came out to the meadow, the old man Kuhl approached him, scythe in hand, and with a single blow severed his head from his body. He and Windon then ripped open his bowels and thrust in the head and then threw the body into a ditch near by and covered it up. This is the substance of the old man's confession, as to the murder. When asked by the Provost Marshal what induced him to murder the inoffensive young man, he replied: "I do not know; I suppose the Devil made me do it."
The execution was fixed for May 9.
The young Kuhl alluded to in the above article, was brought to Gallipolis on Friday, in company with several other bushwhackers from Kanawha, and lodged in jail. On Saturday they left for Wheeling. Kuhl has been sentenced to wear a ball and chain during the war, or for eighteen months. Such unheard of atrocity is only additional testimony to that of the Congressional Committee, alluded to in our editorial columns, and proves that the commission of crime is every where the necessary result of secession.
Timeline of West Virginia: Civil War and Statehood: Undated: May 1862