a nation's joy and jubilee into a nation's grief and woe. We have met this evening to take such action as may be meet and proper to give expression to the feelings of this club at the great calamity which has befallen us all in the loss of our wise ruler and that good man ABRAHAM LINCOLN, President of the United States. Let us as a club mingle our sympathies with those of our common country.

On motion of Mr. T. Bailey Myers, the following resolution was unanimously adopted:

Resolved, That a committee of seven be appointed by the Chair to propose and submit to the club resolutions expressive of the profound grief felt by its members at the loss the country has sustained, in the assassination of the President of the United States.

The following gentlemen were designated to compose such committee: T. Bailey Myers, chairman; Francis A. Stout, Henry T. Tuckerman, W. Cary Smith, George P. Putnam, John H. Platt, Richard Wuint.

On motion of Mr. John A. C. Gray, it was

Resolved, That a committee be appointed to communicate with the authorities and make such arrangements as will enable the club to participate in any funeral obsequies that may be instituted in honor of the late President.

The chair announced the following committee of arrangements: John A. C. Gray, chairman; James H. Van Alen, William S. Constant, W. Gracie Ullshoeffer, Horace M. Ruggles, Schuyler Skaats, John H. Prout.

Captain Charles Pyne suggested that we should recommend to the art committee to secure from one of the artist members a portrait of the late President, to be hung in the club-house. The suggestion was approved.

On motion, the meeting adjourned to meet on the following evening, to receive the reports of the committees.

Pursuant to adjournment the club assembled at 8 o'clock p. m., the president in the chair. The proceedings of the previous meeting were read and approved.

Mr. T. Bailey Myers, chairman of the committee on resolutions, prefaced their introduction with the following remarks:

Mr. PRESIDENT: The duty has been devolved upon me of submitting to the club resolutions feebly expressing our sympathy in this great national bereavement. It would appear eminently proper that we should participate in the public grief over our fallen leader. We have sympathized in his struggles;

have appreciated his exertions and his sacrifices; and now that he has crowned them with his life, it is just that we should lay our humble tribute on his bloody tomb. We all recollect how doubtfully his first inauguration was received; how many of us distrusted his ability to cope with the southern people, goaded into a bitter hatred of the North, under the lash of their unscrupulous leaders. We remember, too, how the heart of the nation rose when he proclaimed that the unity of the States should be preserved. We had doubted, under the feeble administration of his predecessor, whether we were a nation or a temporary consolidation of communities, to be broken at will by any factious member. We realized when the cannon thundered before Sumter that we still possessed the love of country and the disposition to save it at any cost which were necessary to insure that end. We had rung conciliation, compromise, and concession through all their phases; had hesitated at coercion; but now we recognized subjugation, if necessary, as preferable to annihilation; held one more Union-saving meeting, threw down the olive-branch, and drew the sword. Party preferences forgotten, a whole people rushed to arms and accepted ABRAHAM LINCOLN as their leader.

Clubs are little worlds in themselves.

Each member brings to a common centre his prejudices and his sympathies, his intelligence in discussion, and his candor in accepting conviction. The clubs of New York, as organized bodies of intelligent men, at once became the centre of patriotic activity, and much good was done in those early days, and many a man buckled on his sword, took his pen, or arrayed himself actively and usefully in the great cause, inspired by the convictions ripened by club discussion.

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The Athenæum, sir, was not behind in this great work, and she can point with pride to a long list of members who have done good service in the field, in the study, or in the councils of the nation.

We can recall how intensely those who found no better opportunity in active exertion, watched the struggle and followed the progress of our armies, with their flag markers, on the map, as they slowly progressed on the borders of the dark region of secession-grand enough to form the area of an empiredark enough for the ante-chamber of Hades. The news from the army was received with intense anxiety; we mourned over their reverses; we rejoiced in their triumphs. We fought their battles over again; canvassed private information and private reports, and sometimes accepted probabilities for results, and rumors for facts, often to be disappointed. We had our favorite generals and our prejudices against generals, and discussed the merits of Butler, (first in the field,) McClellan, Frémont, McDowell, Pope, Burnside, Rosecrans, Sherman, Thomas, Sheridan, and Grant, as each in turn assumed a prominent place. Perhaps we had a stronger bias for our own three major generals in the field, and a warmer desire that opportunity should be given to them than to others, not only because they were Athenæum men, but because they had distin

guished themselves in many a desperate struggle. Nor were our naval heroes overlooked in the councils of the club, or their brilliant achievements forgotten. With them to engage was to succeed, and a battle was almost invariably a victory.

Perhaps these easy-chair criticisms of more earnest patriots who fought and suffered while we were discussing their efforts in a peaceful seclusion from the din of battle, for which we were indebted to their valor, might argue indifference to the mighty events which were passing around us; but while it was not possible for all to participate, it is but just to believe that many reluctantly accepted inaction as a necessity. To discuss and read the newspapers are pure American characteristics. The deliberations of the Athenæum were but typical of those of all circles at home, and of the cabinets and people of every civilized nation of the globe. The institutions of a mighty nation were on their trial, and the question of self-government to be passed upon. Well might those not battling for them watch and pray!

Meanwhile four years were dragging slowly on. The hand on the dial seemed leaden in its course. The hope of peace often apparently near at hand, still intangible and remote.

In all this period there was a patient, hopeful, earnest man, gifted with a clear perception and an honest, patriotic heart, struggling at the national capital, often within sound of the enemy's cannon, at once the ruler and the servant of the people. To him years were but as days in preserving the life of the nation; he stopped at no labor, he complained of no fatigue, he shunned no responsibility; his only recreation seemed to be the indulgence of a quaint humor in an occasional epigram or joke, which served to show how light his heart was in his good work. We have heard of no jokes made by Jefferson Davis in the course of this war. He has lived to realize in the very existence of his paper fabric of a confederacy, the saddest burlesque of the century.

The exertions of Mr. LINCOLN, and the immense labors thrown upon him in these years, those who have witnessed them can scarcely realize, and they will be but faintly portrayed when the history of the struggle is written. He had to organize a government, an army, a navy, a treasury; to select his colaborers; to reconcile their jealousies; to harmonize discordant factions; to satisfy grasping place-seekers; to decide on such vexed questions of policy at home and abroad as had never been passed upon by any of his predecessors. He had to reward the deserving; encourage the desponding; temper the zeal of the too confident; replenish and protect the treasury; claim the services and the blood of new levies; and carry on, often upon his own responsibility, a war the most gigantic in the history of the world. Who could wonder that he made occasional errors, or that the people sometimes complained of his policy?

But when his course was passed upon by the people, his re-election proved to the North that his general policy was sanctioned, and that they were ready

to carry on the war if it lasted four years longer, aye, or forty years longer, until the great result was gained.

It proved to the South that there was no escape for them in empty truce or hollow compromise; that LINCOLN had promised that he would repossess our forts and public places, and restore every star to our flag, and that promise was about to be fulfilled. LINCOLN was re-elected; Sherman was advancing; Grant stood firm before Richmond, after refusing to recognize defeat, and the anaconda was winding itself slowly around the body of the beast.

At length came the crowning success-Richmond had fallen! and LINCOLN was in person in the rebel capital, intent, with the generous impulse of a noble heart, to check the carnage and protect the fallen foe. Scarcely returned from that mission of mercy, the felon blow was struck which calls forth a nations' grief.

Had he fallen by the hand of an unyielding rebel on his entry into the capital there would have been some palliation for the act in the voluntary risk he assumed, but to strike him unarmed and unprotected, in the bosom of his family, in a place of amusement, where he had gone as a simple American citizen, unprotected by the guard his rank could have claimed and the value of his life to the people required, was to take advantage of his confiding nature; and in his act the assassin displayed the utter baseness and depravity of his nature, and the horrible teachings of the fallen cause he sought to sustain by murder.

It will be said, sir, that his act was not justified by the whole southern people; and there will doubtless be those there who will denounce it as a crime and despise the assassin; but there will be many to exult in LINCOLN's fall, and would be more if he had not lived to inaugurate measures of forgiveness which they will fear his successor may not carry out. The claim of the South to represent the second age of chivalry has departed. A gentle heart was as necessary to it as gentle blood. Such a heart beat in the bosom of ABRAHAM LINCOLN, and it beat long enough, after humbling the haughty and setting their bondsmen free, in turn to temper his treatment to the vanquished with mercy, and allow his captives to depart in safety, each with the free gift of his charger and his sword. Chivalry had no nobler achievement or more gentle courtesy than this. Contrast it with Libby prison, and the prison pens of the remote south, where our brother members have participated in southern hospitality. They were not arranged after the fashion of chivalric receptions of a fallen foe. There was little of chivalry in the massacre at Fort Pillow. We have no record of threats to "cut out the hearts;" no minute descriptions of curious knives to disembowel an adversary; no shell hidden in coal-bunkers; no theory of starving a captured foeman into a non-combatant in the pages of Froissart or Monstrelet. It is to the savage teaching of secession and not of chivalry that we are indebted

that we have to-day a wide house of mourning in our land, and a martyred successor of Washington in our annals.

On behalf of the committee I offer the following resolutions:

Whereas Providence has permitted in its wisdom that the President of the United States should fall by an assassin's blow, aimed at the dignity of the nation, the Athenæum Club, recognizing the loss which they have sustained in common with their fellow-citizens, do

Resolve, That we recognize in the life of our lamented Chief Magistrate the patient and untiring efforts of a noble, magnanimous, and patriotic heart to restore to its integrity a nation over which it was his fortune to be called to preside when divided and torn by a rebellion more savage and vindictive than any known in the history of the world; and that in his death we have witnessed a martyrdom to those efforts which turned against his life the fangs of the serpent which he had torn from the heart of his country. That in his efforts to achieve this great work he has displayed a patriotic perseverance and an ardent desire to restore the Union with as little distress as was practicable, even to those misguided men who, from motives of personal ambition, have striven with a fiendish malignity to destroy what their fathers created. That at the moment of his death he had fully accomplished what he had so long struggled for with varied success, earning a reward only second to that bestowed upon the Father of his Country, and leaving it to his successor to deal with the leaders of this vile conspiracy, and to reorganize and protect their misguided followers under the protection of the old flag.

Resolved, That in the manner of his death we witness the results of the teachings of secession, and how they have succeeded "in firing the southern heart," as manifested in the bitter hatred which has been displayed by the rebels in all their acts; and that in the assassination of one so genial, so kindly, and so generous, at the very moment when he was standing between the defeated and prostrate traitors and the indignation of an outraged people, will, when consciousness returns to these misguided men, teach them that they have more to regret in his death than those who have, under the Constitution, recognized his administration and strengthened his hands. As Moses from the top of Pisgah beheld the promised land, he was permitted to view the coming restoration of the union of the States and the triumph of the laws, for which he had patiently labored through four tempestuous years, before his eyes were closed in death.

Resolved, That we tender the expression of our deep sympathy to the family of the late President and to our fellow-citizens.

Resolved, That the club-house be draped in black, and that the members wear the ordinary badge of mourning for thirty days.

Resolved, That we tender our profound sympathy to the Secretary of State and to the Assistant Secretary in the dastardly assault committed upon them,