On October 1, 1895, two thousand Armenians assembled in Constantinople (now Istanbul) to petition for the implementation of the reforms, but Ottoman police units converged on the rally and violently broke it up.

"[7] After revolutionary groups had secured the deposition of Sultan Abdul Hamid II and the restoration of the Second Constitutional Era (Ottoman Empire) in 1908, a military revolt directed against the Committee of Union and Progress seized Constantinople.

While the revolt lasted only ten days, it reignited anti-Armenian sentiment in the region and precipitated the mass destruction of Armenian businesses and farms, public hangings, sexual violence, and executions rooted in political, economic, and religious prejudice.

Within a year, the Turkish Empire's Armenian population, empowered by the dismissal of Abdul Hamid II, began organizing politically in support of the new government, which promised to place them on equal legal footing with their Muslim counterparts.

[10] Having long endured so-called dhimmi status, and having suffered the brutality and oppression of Hamidian leadership since 1876, the Armenians in Cilicia perceived the nascent Young Turk government as a godsend.

[citation needed] The countercoup of 1909 wrested control of the government from the secularist Young Turks, and Abdul Hamid II briefly recovered his dictatorial powers.

[11] Many of the Christian Armenians were hopeful of more equality after the coup against Sultan Abdul Hamid II, which removed the Islamic head of state from power.

[9] According to one source, when news of a mutiny in Constantinople (now Istanbul) arrived in Adana, speculation circulated among the Muslim population of an imminent Armenian insurrection.

[13] In his August 1909 report on the massacre, Charles Doughty-Wylie asserts that "The theory of an armed revolution on the part of the Armenians is now generally discredited with the more intelligent people."

Doughty-Wylie explained that an uprising could not be said to be taking place without some concentration of forces, or without any effort to make use of the various available strongholds, and in any case the number of Armenians would be "an easy match for the regular Ottoman army."

From this document the historian Vahakn Dadrian culls the text: The Turks, masters for centuries, found their great stumbling block in equality with the Christians...

In every cafe the heathen were speaking great mouthing words of some godless and detested change...[16]Abdul Hamid became celebrated, in this context, according to Doughty-Wylie, because he "had set the fashion of massacres".

From the same document, the Turkish political scientist Kamuran Gurun emphasizes that the right to bear arms had caused a popular fashion of arms-bearing.

"[21] Some order was restored by April 20, as the disturbance in Mersina had abated, and the British cruiser HMS Swiftsure was able to deliver "provisions and medicines intended for Adana.

[24] An April 22 message from an American missionary in Hadjin indicated that the town was taking fire intermittently, that surrounding Armenian properties had been burned, and that siege was inevitable.

[25] As Ottoman authorities worked to contain violence directed at the Christians of the Empire, the Armenian population "look(ed) to the Young Turks for future protection.

Saturday morning I counted a dozen cartloads of Armenian bodies in one-half hour being carried to the river and thrown into the water.

An unsigned newspaper report of 3 May 1909 indicated that Ottoman soldiery had arrived, but did not seem intent upon effecting a peace: Adana is terrorized by 4,000 soldiers, who are looting, shooting, and burning.

[9] In response to the counterrevolution and the Armenian massacres in Adana, the CUP and Dashnak concluded an agreement in September 1909 whereby they promised to "work together for progress, the Constitution, and unity."

The Unionists took care to have an Armenian minister present in the governments formed after 6 August 1909, which could also be interpreted as an attempt to demonstrate the CUP's distance from the Adana events.

According to Elizabeth S. Webb, a missionary attached to the school, "It was a terrible situation, women and girls practically alone in the building, a murderous bloodthirsty mob outside, with knife and bullet for the Armenians and the torch for their homes.

[38]British war correspondent Francis McCullagh wrote a year later in his book on the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II that 20,000 Armenians in Adana had been "massacred amid circumstances of such unspeakable brutality that the whole world was shocked.

"[2] The British Vice-Consul, Charles Hotham Montagu Doughty-Wylie, is recorded in many sources as having worked strenuously to stop the massacres, at great personal risk.