After taking leave of his wife, Mr. Horton proceeded in the cars from his residence in Carrolton to the city. Ever apt to look hopefully on the worst prospects, and slow to suspect evil of his fellow-men, he had felt no fears of injury for this day, beyond perhaps a forcible seizure and commitment to the parish prison.
The hour arriving for opening the Convention, and Mr. Horton having entered the hall, stood up to offer prayer just as the clock struck twelve. Strongly and fervently his words came up, breathing petitions for the peace of his country and the deliverance of the oppressed. God heard him, but with that prayer His servant's work ended, and then He gave him for a little while to the cruel wrath of his enemies, that He might make that wrath praise Him. Immediately on the sounding of the stroke of noon from the city clocks, and simultaneously with the opening of Mr. Horton's prayer, the armed police filed out of the several stations, three hundred strong, and marched toward the Institute. Some of them entered the hall during the prayer, a mob in the meantime rapidly collecting round the door, and hardly had the good man uttered the closing "amen" when a miscreant fired a bullet at his head.
There could be no longer any doubt of the intentions of the officers and the mob. The latter assailed the windows and crushed in at the doors. "Kill him! kill him!" they yelled. "Shoot every cursed Yankee in the house!" Just then all the bells in the city began to toll. It was the preconcerted signal of slaughter, and now the horrors of the day began.
The disloyalist ruffians rushed in with pistols, knives and clubs, and commenced their appointed work of murder. Resistance was hopeless. The Convention broke up in the wildest confusion, some of its members falling dead, and many mortally wounded in the hall, while a few who could, fled. The Union men saw that they were doomed. Instead of protecting them, and arresting the rioters at the firing of the first shot, as with their force they could easily have done, the police headed the attack, and there is reason to believe that one of their number fired the first shot.
Mr. Horton received five balls in his body, and fell. These balls were fired by policemen. Not satisfied with their work, they seized him, battered his head with their billies, stabbed him, kicked and dragged him on the pavements to the first station, the mob following behind, cursing, beating and trampling him with their shoes. Thrusting him into a cell, he was left mangled and senseless.
Meantime the shopkeepers of the city had closed their stores, and strolled about, gratified spectators of the fiendish carnival, greeting the murderers of Horton, and every squad of policemen that passed them dragging a bleeding loyalist, with shouts of "Good! good! Kill the white nigger."
Around the Mechanics' Institute and in the adjacent streets upwards of one hundred negroes lay weltering in their blood, and the dead carts drove by loaded with warm corpses and bodies of the wounded still writhing with life, all tumbled indiscriminately together.
In one of these carts the mangled Horton was flung, after lying awhile at the station-house, and under a stifling load of dead and wounded negroes, his stomach crushed in by a blow of a heavy plank, he was taken to the Marine Hospital.
Furious with the taste of blood, the police and their fellow Thugs raged up and down some of the streets of the city, calling out the names of well-known loyalists, declaring their intention to slaughter every Union man in New Orleans. In the midst of the excitement and carnage, the bayonets of Federal troops appeared, and further murder was prevented. The mob dispersed, and the blood-stained streets, and battered windows, and muffled groans from distant hospital wards alone testified to the horrors of the 30th of July.
As the hours of that bloody day passed, the wife of Mr. Horton waited at her home, five miles distant, for his return. Three o'clock came, the limit he had set for his absence. She looked long and anxiously to catch a glimpse of him approaching along the familiar street. He did not come, and her anxiety grew into alarm. To add to her terror, a breathless messenger arrived at her residence, and warned her that she would not be safe there that night, for trouble had happened at the State-House, and the secessionists were searching for all the Unionists in the city and suburbs. Hastily summoning the negro servant, she told her to bar the doors and windows, and with a few hurried preparations then set off for the city, to learn the fate of her husband.