Gazette Of The United States

FROM THE HAMPSHIRE GAZETTE.

A correspondent has furnished us with the following authentic anecdotes, which may shew the unhappy and melancholy effects of intrusting the education of youth to immoral persons or strangers.

ANECDOTES.

A PERSON from Great-Britain lately arrived in South-Carolina, and set himself up for a school-master. For a few months he was employed with some degree of caution. But his abilities as a school-master were soon conspicuous in the uncommon progress of his pupils. Withal he assumed the appearance of strict morals and exemplary piety and devotion. This, added to his singular diligence and attention to his school, soon procured him the unbounded confidence of the neighbouring gentlemen and ladies. His school flourished with growing reputation. Under a pretext of imparting instruction to several young ladies under his care, he frequently detained one and another of them singly after the school was dismissed for the day. In this practice he continued until he had seduced and abused no less than five or six of the unhappy children. At length he made an attempt upon a young girl of resolute virtue and daring spirit, whom he solicited to a compliance with his unhallowed lusts. She deeply resented the base solicitation. His passions were inflamed by opposition—he offered violence—he attempted by force what he could not obtain by entreaty. She resolutely and successfully repelled his attacks, until at length watching her opportunity, she escaped at the door, and hastened by her terrors soon reached her father's house. She immediately unbosomed her soul to her parents, and gave them a detail of the school-master's vile attempt. The father, by vigorous struggles mastered his resentment, until he had collected the fathers of the young ladies in the school. To them he opened the villainous affair, and acquainted them with the master's long practice of detaining their daughters singly in the school. The parents agreed to make enquiry of their daughters. Upon enquiry no less than five or six found that their daughters either by insinuation, threatening or force, had been overcome and debauched. Fully ascertained of the facts, they resolved upon the punishment of the culprit in a summary manner—in a manner dictated by the nature of the crime. They made sharp their knives, went in a body to the school house, ordered home the children, set the wretch's crimes in order before him, and then castrated him on the spot, and left him to his own reflections. In the following night he crept into a neighbouring wood, and the next day died. Such was the universal odium and detestation of his brutal lust and perfidious hypocrisy, that the voice of justice made no enquiry after the authors of his punishment.

A recent instance of the public execution of a school-master, a stranger, in the county of Worcester, convicted of a rape upon a young girl in his school—And a third instance of a British foreigner, who eloped with another man's wife, and married her, and set up a school in a town in this vicinity, and was detected in attempts upon the young girls in his school: These are admonitions sufficient to all parents not lost to a sense of decency, family purity and reputation, never to employ a stranger, much less an immoral profligate, and a hag-beaten debauchee, in the government and instruction of their beloved offspring.