1865.]

591

In

APRIL, 1865, was a month of triumph and of mourning to the people of the United States. its earlier days, the Confederate capital was occupied by the forces of the Union, and Lee surrendered to Grant. In its later days, Sherman achieved his final success, and the Confederacy, except in a few scattered members, lay dead before its foe. But between those two sets of events occurred a tragedy which had then no parallel in American annals, which convulsed the nation with rage and grief, and affected even foreign lands with astonishment, with pity, and with horror. For the first time in the records of the Republic, political assassination struck down the head of the Government, and sought with hasty and murderous hands to settle the great problems of the day. On the morning of the 14th of April, the political and social condition of the country seemed in a fairer way for temperate and just arrangement than it had ever been before. At night, all was wild uncertainty, alarm, and clamour, owing to a crime, or rather to a series of crimes, more characteristic of Russian or Turkish despotism than of the free and reasonable life of a people accustomed to constitutional forms, to the energy of discussion, and to the supremacy of law. The incident of a moment had darkened the faces of men more than four years of civil strife.

Mr. Lincoln had entered on his second Presidential term not more than six weeks when the bullet of an assassin closed his mortal career. He had nearly seen the end of the great contest for which his first election served as the pretext; but many difficulties yet remained to be overcome, and the President looked grave and thoughtful. The roughly-hewn, shaggy, uncouth face brightened every now and then with its pleasant and genial smile; but the lines were more deeply furrowed

than they had been a few years before, and the shadow of vast responsibilities gave something of sublimity to features that in themselves were homely and almost grotesque. Rulers of men, however, must occasionally appear among the people; and it may have been as much for this reason as for personal entertainment and relaxation that Mr. Lincoln, with his wife and a few attendants, visited Ford's Theatre, at Washington, on the evening of the 14th of April, which was Good Friday. He had just returned from Richmond, and during the day had attended, together with General Grant, a meeting of the Cabinet, at which the new position of affairs had been discussed. On that occasion he had expressed himself with much kindness towards the South, and, looking forward to the speedy termination of the war, had hoped that the separated members of the great family would soon be united as of old. Still, he seemed depressed and anxious. His manner was very different from what it usually appeared. Instead of telling ludicrous stories, as he was frequently in the habit of doing, he sat with his chin upon his breast, thinking. Something extraordinary, he said, was about to happen, and that very soon. Upon being jestingly asked by the Attorney-General, Mr. Bates, if it would be something good, he replied, very gravely, "I don't know; I don't know. But it will happen, and shortly too." He was asked whether he had received any information not yet disclosed to his Ministers; but he answered that he had not. A dream which had occurred to him twice before had come a third time, and it was this which made him so unusually grave. The first time, the dream preceded the battle of Bull Run; the second time, it was followed by some other disaster to the Federals. As he still sat moodily

with downcast head, the Attorney-General desired to be told the nature of this dream. "Well," replied the President, without lifting his head, "I am on a great, broad, rolling river-and I am in a boatand I drift-and I drift! But this is not business. Let us proceed to business, gentlemen.' Rumours of an impending attack upon his life were in circulation; but, although he could not have forgotten that a plot of this nature was undoubtedly in existence at the time of his original inauguration into the Presidential office, he professed his disbelief in any such design, and went to the theatre in the evening in simple reliance on the good faith of men.

The occupants of the box were the President himself, Mrs. Lincoln, Major Rathbone, and Miss Harris. General Grant was to have joined them in the course of the evening, but business detained him. At a quarter past ten, a young man named John Wilkes Booth-son of Junius Brutus Booth, a well-known English actor of the days of Edmund Kean, and himself connected with the stage passed along the box-lobby, and, exhibiting a card to the President's messenger, obtained an entrance into the vestibule of the State box. He then quietly closed the door behind him, and fastened it by bracing a short plank across from one of the side partitions to the other. Having thus secured himself from external interruption, he drew a small Derringer pistol, which he carried in his right hand, while his left held a long, double-edged dagger. These preparations were not heard by the occupants of the box, who were at the moment intent on the dramatic action of the piece. The President was leaning forward, holding aside the curtain of the box with his left hand, and glancing round at the audience in the body of the house. Entirely unobserved by any one, Booth noiselessly approached his victim, and, resting his pistol on the chair, shot him through the back of the head. Mr. Lincoln swayed slightly forward, and his eyes closed; but in other respects his attitude remained the same. He seems to have passed at once into a state of total unconsciousness. Major Rathbone, turning round at the report of the pistol, saw through the smoke a man standing between him and the President. He endeavoured to seize him; but Booth, tearing himself away, and dropping the pistol, struck at his antagonist with the dagger, and wounded him severely in the left arm. Exclaiming "Sic semper tyrannis!" he leaped over the front of the box on to the stage, but caught one of his spurs

* This remarkable story was told by Mr. Stanton, early in 1868, to Dickens, during his second visit to America, and is related by the novelist in a letter to Mr. Forster, published in the latter's life of Dickens, Vol. III., pp. 386-8.

open air.

in the national flag which hung immediately below where the President was sitting. This caused him to fall somewhat heavily, though only for a moment. On regaining his feet, he faced the audience, brandished his dagger in a melodramatic way, and shouted "The South is avenged!" Before any one could stop him, he rushed towards the stage-door, which his familiarity with theatres enabled him to find with facility, and escaped into the He had provided himself with a horse, and on this he fled swiftly into Lower Maryland.t Consternation fell upon the audience at the sudden and atrocious deed. Surgeons were immediately sent for, and Mr. Lincoln was carried to a house close by. He still breathed, but had evidently no sense of what was passing around him. In this comatose state he lingered for several hours, and it was not until twenty-two minutes past seven on the morning of the following day, April 15th, that he breathed his last. About the same time that the murder of the President was being committed, an attempt was made to assassinate Mr. Seward, the principal member of the Cabinet. Owing to injuries received in a carriage accident,. that gentleman was confined to his bed; and while lying there on the night in question, a man, whose name was afterwards ascertained to be Payne, or Payne Powell, presented himself at the door of the Secretary's house, and requested admission on the plea of bringing medicine. He was refused, but, brushing past the servant, he darted up-stairs to the third floor, and, with a pistol which he carried, knocked down Mr. Seward's son, who endeavoured to stop him, fractured his skull in two places, and otherwise severely injured him. He then entered the room, and stabbed the Secretary in the throat and face with a dagger, in the presence of one of his daughters. An invalid soldier, who was nursing the sick man, threw himself on the intruder, but was seriously wounded in several places. Payne tore himself away the next moment, and, dashing down-stairs, stabbed Major Seward (the eldest son of the Secretary) and an attendant. The entire incident had taken up only a few seconds; but it had fallen on the house like a tornado. Five wounded men were left behind him by the ruffian, who mounted his horse, and rode away without the least precipitation, fearing no immediate pursuit.

In the agitation of the public mind consequent on these daring and extraordinary crimes, it was not unreasonably believed that a vast conspiracy had been planned by Southern politicians, to effect by murder what they could not accomplish by + Raymond's Life of President Lincoln. Despatch of Secretary Stanton to Mr. Adams, American Minister in London.

1865.]

military force. Measures were taken by General Grant for protecting the city against any wild outbreak, and the general direction of affairs was for the time assumed by Mr. Stanton, the War Secretary. Guards were set about the persons of Mr. Andrew Johnson (the Vice-President), and of the other members of the Government; and special attention was paid to the Confederate prisoners in the jail, not merely to frustrate any attempt to escape that might be made, but to protect the captives themselves from the fury of the populace. The excitement, however, speedily calmed down, and the thoughts of the public were directed to the pursuit of Booth. From Maryland, the assassin of Mr. Lincoln fled into Virginia, where, at a place called Bowling Green, in Caroline County, he was hunted down by a party of cavalry on the 26th of April. He was accompanied by a man named Harrold, who had been concerned in the plot; and the two, unable to proceed any farther, had taken refuge in a barn. The building being surrounded by the soldiers, Booth and Harrold were summoned to surrender. The latter at once complied; the former, who had severely sprained his ankle in leaping from the President's box, and who must by this time have been too much exhausted for renewed exertions, endeavoured to parley with his pursuers, and, addressing the commanding officer, said, "Captain, give me a chance. Draw off your men, and I will fight them singly. I could have killed you six times to-night; but I believed you to be a brave man, and I would not murder you. Give a lame man a show." As he still refused to surrender, the barn was set on fire, and Booth was then seen with a carbine in his hand, threatening resistance to extremity. A soldier fired on him, and he fell mortally wounded. A little before he expired, he said to those about him, "Tell mother I died for my country. I thought I did for the best." Then, raising his hands, he exclaimed, "Uselessuseless!" As the passion of life grew calm before the great serenity of death, this man, ruined by a false, theatrical idea of patriotism, by inapplicable examples derived from Roman history, and by a poor and tawdry sentimentalism, saw the miserable truth that he had destroyed his victim's life and his own, without any good result whatever, even from his own point of view. There is no more pathetic cry than is contained in that reiterated word.

That he was a conscientious man, with something of generosity in his composition, and a desire to do what he conceived to be right, it would be unfair to deny. A letter written by him in the previous January, and which he had sealed up and left with his brother-in-law, carries unmistakable proofs, in

593

the midst of its declamation and verbosity, that he really believed the policy of Mr. Lincoln fatal to the Republic, and that he regarded it as a duty to redress the wrong. Alas, poor country!" he exclaimed, in his tragedy-hero style, "is she to meet her threatened doom? Four years ago I would have given a thousand lives to see her remain as I had always known her-powerful and unbroken. And even now I would hold my life as naught to see her what she was. Oh, my friends! if the fearful scenes of the past four years never had been enacted, or if what has been had been but a frightful dream, from which we could now awake, with what overflowing hearts could we bless our God, and pray for his continued favour! How I have loved the old flag can never now be known. A few years since, and the entire world could boast of none so pure and spotless. But I have of late been seeing and hearing of the bloody deeds of which she has been made the emblem, and would shudder to think how changed she had grown. Oh, how I have longed to see her break from the mist of blood and death that circles round her folds, spoiling her beauty, and tarnishing her honour! But no; day by day has she been dragged deeper and deeper into cruelty and oppression, till now (in my eyes) her once bright red stripes look like bloody gashes on the face of heaven. I look now upon my early admiration of her glories as a dream. My love (as things stand to-day) is for the South alone. Nor do I deem it a dishonour in attempting to make for her a prisoner of this man, to whom she owes so much misery." From this it would appear that Booth's original intention was not to kill, but to capture, the President.

The assassination of Mr. Lincoln excited a feeling of the warmest sympathy in England. It was probably felt that, for the most part, the murdered statesman had received scanty justice at the hands of English critics; that his uncouth manners and blunt speech had been too much suffered to obscure the nobler qualities of his nature; that his errors, many of which were almost unavoidable in the terribly difficult circumstances of his position, had been too severely judged; and that his sagacity and firmness, his devotion to duty, his resolute faith in his country, and his kindness of disposition in the midst of exasperating · passions, had been but grudgingly recognised, where they were recognised at all. But now the inherent

*A remarkable instance of this revulsion of feeling appeared in Punch, which contained an obituary poem on Mr. Lincoln, expressing something like remorse for the persistent misrepre sentations which had been made by that journal-a recantation perhaps the most extraordinary that has ever appeared in print.

1

greatness of the man was seen and acknowledged; and the utter immorality of a cause which began with treason and ended in assassination became apparent to the general conscience. The Queen wrote with her own hand a letter of condolence to Mrs. Lincoln. Several of the municipal and public bodies of the United Kingdom, including the corporation of London, gave expression to their respect for the deceased President, and their sorrow at his death. The subject was brought before the notice of both Houses of Parliament by the Govern

other tested the moral qualities of a man, the late President had performed his duty with simplicity and strength; and in the midst of the prevailing sorrow it was consolatory to reflect that assassination had never changed the history of the world." To these addresses her Majesty replied:-"I entirely participate in the sentiments you have expressed in your address to me on the subject of the assassination of the President of the United States, and I have given directions to my Minister at Washington to make known to the Government of that

ment of the day, and a motion for an address to her Majesty, expressive of sympathy with the people of the United States, was carried unanimously by Lords and Commons on the 1st of May. The Opposition was represented in the one chamber by the late Lord Derby, and in the other by Mr. Disraeli. The latter happily remarked that "in the character of the victim, and in the very accessories of his almost latest moment, there was something so homely and so innocent that it took the subject, as it were, out of the pomp of history and the ceremonial of diplomacy. It touched the heart of the nation, and appealed to the domestic sentiments of mankind. In a trial which perhaps more than any

country the feelings which you entertain, in common with myself and my whole people, with regard to this deplorable event."

By the provisions of the Constitution, the VicePresident, Mr. Andrew Johnson, succeeded to the Presidency immediately on the death of Mr. Lincoln. He was a native of Raleigh, North Carolina, where he was born on the 29th of December, 1808; but while a young man he had settled in Tennessee, and it was that State which he represented in Congress. he represented in Congress. His parentage was humble; he had himself worked as a journeyman tailor; his education was slight and defective, and his abilities, though far from contemptible, were