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Reporting the Bulgarian Massacres: "The Suffering in Bulgaria, "

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Reporting the Bulgarian Massacres: JAMES F. CLARKE (Pittsburgh, Pa., U.S.A.) Reporting the Bulgarian Massacres: " "The Suffering in Bulgaria, by Henry O. Dwight and the Rev. J. F. Clarke (1876) There are three widely-publicized "eye-witness" accounts in English of the Turkish atrocities resulting from the Bulgarian uprising of May, 1876. The re- volt began 20 April Old Style, hence is known as the "April Uprising." Start- ing prematurely 2 May (N.S.) in the area north and southwest of Plovdiv, it was officially declared over by 26 May. It was badly planned, organized, led and equipped, more Mazzinian than Garibaldian, a miserable failure hardly calling for the savage reprisals by bashi-bazuks (local Muslim Pomak volun- teer home guards), expatriated Circassians, and eventually Turkish regulars. But for this very reason, the "crime of the century" became Europe's greatest problem, escalated into the Russo-Turkish War (1877-78), and ended at the Congress of Berlin in the partial liberation and independence of Bulgaria, thus making the April revolution one of the shortest and most successful in his- tory. According to H. O. Dwight, "The revolt was the maddest freak that ever led men to death." I A major factor in converting failure into success were the three inquiries, undertaken more or less simultaneously in late July and early August, which substantiated the dispatches from Constantinople of Edwin Pears in the Lon- don Daily News of 23 June and later, based on first-hand material direct from the "front," received and transmitted to Pears by George Washburn and Albert Long and associates of Robert College in Constantinople. It was the 23 June story which triggered the hue and cry in England over the "Bulgarian Horrors."2 The three reports, in order of publication, all in London, the first two by Americans, were the dispatches of J. A. MacGahan, in the Daily News, start- ing 7 August from Batak; the so-called "Preliminary Report" of Eugene Schuyler, U. S. Consul-General in Constantinople, leaked to the London Daily News, 29 August and later published with MacGahan's collected dis- 1. Turkish Life in Wartime(New York: C. Scribner's 1881), p. 22, in a dispatch from Constantinople to the New York Tribune, dated 1 June 1876. 2. David Harris, Britain and the Bulgarian Horrors of 1876 (Chicago: Univ.of Chica- go Press, 1939); R. T. Shannon, Gladstone and the BulgarianAgitation (London: Nelson, 1963); Edwin Pears, Forty Years in Constantinople, 2nd ed. (London: H. Jenkins, 1916), ch. 2. There was an earlier story by Frank O'Donnell in the $pectator of 3 June, consisting largely of generalities and rumors picked up by his stringer in Vienna. For O'Donnell's claim to priority, see his A Borrowed Plume of the Daily News, the First Description of the BulgarianRising in 1876, (London: A. L. Humphries, 1912). 279 patches; and the report of Walter Baring, recently appointed junior secretary in the British Embassy in Constantinople, published 19 September.3 Behind all three, directly or indirectly, stood the Americans George Wash- bum, acting president of Robert College, and his close associate Albert Long. The sensational material they gave Pears and the resulting furor and official denials in England led the Daily News to "commission" MacGahan to cover the Bulgarian massacre story and Prime Minister Disraeli-in self defense- to order the Baring mission. Not only did Washburn brief Baring but he then recruited Schuyler, with the tacit approval of the American Minister, Horace Maynard, to make an independent investigation and thus to check-mate Baring.4 Januarius Aloysius MacGahan was a veteran American journalist, roving :orrespondent for the New York Herald and author of several books recount- ing some of his journalistic adventures. Since 1871 he had spent a good deal of time in Russia. MacGahan's greatest adventure is described in Campaigning on the Oxus and the Fall of Khiva, a 900-mile chase after Russian General Kaufinann through forbidden and forbidding territory in Central Asia.5 When the New York Herald neglected to sign him up, the Daily News com- missioned him (hence "Commissioner") to cover the Bulgarian atrocities. He arrived in Constantinople in mid-July. MacGahan's tear-jerking purple prose, not always accurate, widely translated and disseminated in Europe and Rus- sia, after a century still makes goose-flesh reading. Subsequently, he was one of seventeen Daily News correspondents covering the Russo-Turkish war. Had he lived we would have had another book, this time about his adventures in Bulgaria. But a week after he went to attend his friend Lt. F. V. Greene, U.S. military observer with the Russian forces, stricken with typhoid in Constanti- 3. The Turkish Atrocities in Bulgaria. Letters of the Special Commissioner of the "Daily News,"J. A. MacGahan, Esq. With an Introduction and Mr. Schuyler's Prelimi- nary Report (London: Bradbury, Agnew, 1876), 6 Sept. (?); "Report by Mr. Baring on the Bulgarian Insurrection of 1876," supplement to the official London Gazette, 19 Sept. 1876. 4. J. F. Clarke, "George Washburn and the April Uprising," Bulgarian.Academyof Sciences,Centennial of the April Uprising, Sofia, 1976, based on "The Personal Recol- lections of George Washburn, 1856-1900" (unpublished); cf. Washburn, Fifty Years in Constantinople and Recollections of Robert College (Boston and New York: Houghten Mifflin, 1909). 5. New York: Harper, 1874. On MacGahan, see F. L. Bullard, Famous War Corres- pondents (Boston: Little, Brown, 1914), pp. 116-1; and John Hohenberg,Foreign Cor- respondents : The Great Reporters and their Times (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1964). See also C. Genov, "Januarius A. MacGahan and Bulgaria," Bulgarian Historical Review, 4, No. 1 (1976), 60-63. Few can resist spelling out MacGahan's name. T. D. Dimitrov, Ianuari Macgahan. 1844-1878 g. (Sofiia: Nauka i Izkustvo, 1977) reached me after this article was completed. .
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