I told Spangler to step aside and took his place beside the governor. I closed the lid of the box and rested my arm on it while I began talking to the stage manager about my song. He blew the whistle for the scene to change and Spangler was obliged to rush off to his position, and all the persons standing in the entrance had to leave. I turned to go back to my place, and had just taken the first step down the stairs leading underneath the stage when I heard a pistol shot. I heard the sound of something falling out on the stage, followed by sounds of jumps crossing the floor. There suddenly appeared through the entrance a wild man with a dagger in his hand. It was Booth. His hair appeared to be standing on end. His face had a look of ferocity. His eyes were protruding from their sockets. He turned and saw me. 'Let me pass! Let me pass!' he exclaimed. He made a rush at me and his waving dagger cut a gash through the left side of my coat, but did not touch my skin. He kept pushing on in such a hysterical manner that I could not get out of his way. Again the dagger cut into my clothes, this time on my shoulder, inflicting a slight flesh wound. 'Damn you!' he cried, and gave me a tremendous shove, knocking me sprawling to the floor, at the same time making a lunge at me with the dagger. By this time people were yelling and rushing toward us. There were cries of 'Kill him! Lynch him! The death blow he intended for me was never delivered. He jerked the stage door open and closed it after him, but before he closed it I saw the head of a horse and "Peanut John" holding the bridle. An officer led me on the stage and pointed to the President's box. Mr. Lincoln's body had slid down in the chair.' BEFORE LINCOLN WAS A GREAT MAN HE turbulent, perplexing times just before the Civil War, the secession talk, the formation of the great Republican party, peculiarly interesting because of the sharp reverses which that party has recently suffered, and the terrifying years of the War of Secession, itself—these are all tending rapidly to lose vividness in the memory of a generation that finds itself facing problems more numerous and no less puzzling. People called upon to make up their minds about Trusts, graft in and out of public life, Government control of public utilities, the tango, votes for women, the usefulness of the church, scientific marriage according to law, and independent alliance according to inclination, immigration, social injustice and waste, the high cost of things in general, whether the theatre shall be too alluring to be uplifting or too uplifting to be alluring, and the Progressive party, find themselves somewhat busy for pondering incidents of half a century ago. The emotions of those days have passed with the conditions that produced them; only a few people live who know what they were like. The events themselves have attained the neglected importance of history. It is pleasant, consequently, to find occasionally one who can give force again to their lesson of simple living and intense devotion to a cause, through the memory of personalties, always of interest even after the affairs in which they moved here have yielded their place in the public mind. Life on an old-time court circuit, the lively political campaigns which sounded the death knell of the Whig party and produced the Republican party from the opposition of the Democrats, the striving of factions in the South, and many other observations of the personal aspect of the affairs of the '50's and early '60's are given in a volume of recollections by Jane Martin Johns, writing of that period in Illinois, in a book of memoirs publishd by the Decatur Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution. Through many pages of the book is felt the personality of Abraham Lincoln in those less well-known years of his life when he was, in quiet, almost unconscious power, dominating the political and legal circles in which he found himself and moving surely toward the day when he would be named as "The railsplitter candidate" for President in 1860. Many an incident of his years as a lawyer, just rising from obscurity, casting light upon the character of the man who was to be misunderstood, hated, and revered as the great individual of his time, are given in the book in the course of its comment. The period, as Mrs. Johns pictures it, may be said to find its unity in Lincoln's life. It is a fascinating description of him which she gives in her first chapter on her personal recollections of him. "It is sixty-two years," she writes, "since I first met Mr. Lincoln, at that time a semi-obscure lawyer and politician, nowhere towering above his fellows except in stature. He had the local status of an honest, genial man, too honest, too kind, too genial ever to become a success in the world, His personal appearance and dress were not sufficiently marked to be remembered, yet I think no man ever knew him and forgot him." The story of Lincoln's first political speech, given in Decatur in reply to a Democratic stump speaker who had attacked the Old Line Whigs, with whom Lincoln was then allied, is a significant forecast of his later character in public life. Lincoln had come in from his plowing to hear the speaking, and is described as follows: "Very tall and thin; wore a 'hickory' shirt with collar of same, turned back at his throat; a broad-brimmed straw hat with a piece fringed out at one side, and a black string tied around the crown to make it fit the head, and very tight towlinen pants, much above his bare feet and ankles." When the speaker finished, Lincoln was so stirred by the attack on his party that he jumped up on the splintery stump of a tree which had been blown down, and won the cheers of the crowd with his refutation |