[From the Presse, April 28, 1865.]
A DISHONORED CAUSE.
How blind are those assassins who take up arms at the instigation of political hatred! They think they strike the cause which they detest, but it is their own cause which they injure and which they dishonor, the idiots!
What has been accomplished by the fatal shot by which President Lincoln lost his life? It has abridged by some years, by some months, by some weeks, perhaps by some days only, the existence of Abraham Lincoln, who might have been carried off by an illness, or an accident, as a few days before Mr. Seward was nearly killed by a fall from a carriage, but the blow which has deprived Mr. Lincoln of life has assured him immortality.
Some hours less in a lifetime! What are they? Can they be put in the balance with succeeding ages in posterity?
The history of the republic of the United States counts fourteen Presidents. The names of the greater part of them are already forgotten, but there are three names which will never die, those of Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln. [Page 134] That of Washington, personifying the lofty disinterestedness which refused the crown; of Jefferson, personifying power made illustrious by respect for liberty; of Lincoln, personifying the devotedness of a man who dies for having given freedom to millions of men.
The assassination of Abraham Lincoln will have a withering effect upon Jefferson Davis, if, with the impulse of indignation, shame, and grief, the first act of the president of the Confederate States be not to protest, in the name of the cause which he defended, against this new appendage to war, which, if it became general, would descend from collective to individual murder—to the usurping executioner, constituting himself an avenger of faithless victory. War was wanting in the process by which this boasted crime might become a qualified one; so that, after having commenced war on the field of battle, it might be ended in the assize court!
Perhaps this termination was necessary in order that the eyes might cease to be blinded by the smoke of gunpowder, and that persons dazzled with glory should ask themselves what difference there was between the ball which might have struck General Grant in the theatre of war and that which in another theatre struck President Lincoln.
This is no commonplace suggestion. Let it not be said that the soldier who aimed at General Grant would have risked his life, and that it was not so with the assassin who fired the fatal shot at President Lincoln. Let the first continue to be called brave, but let not the second be called a coward That would be neither true nor just. Wilkes Booth and his accomplices were quite aware that they risked their lives, and when those lives come to be taken by the executioner, the greatest dishonor will not rest upon the men personally, but on their cause, if every connexion between them and it be not, we repeat, spontaneously and solemnly repudiated by president Davis, basing his submission upon the horror with which this outrage inspired him, and, as a pledge of the sincerity of this submission, consigning himself to voluntary banishment.
For president Davis and those of his generals who have not laid down their arms there is no other honorable course to pursue. If they hesitate, they are not only lost but dishonored, and it will be upon them that the responsibility will justly fall of all the excesses which an angry populace and an irritated and desperate army might, but we hope would not, commit in the excitement of anger and indignation.
If president Jefferson Davis does not hasten to furnish this example of political candor and honesty, let him reckon no longer upon the sympathies of Europe, which were attached to his person and his cause. In the eyes of all whose conscience is not perverted by passion there will be only one malefactor fallen still lower than his accomplices, the assassins of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Seward, and his precursor, the executioner of John Brown.
What a sorry cause was that which commenced in November, 1859, with the destruction of John Brown, that glorious martyr, whose firmness never forsook him a single moment; and which finished in April, 1865, by the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, that imperturbable President, who demonstrated that democracy had only to spread open its wings to soar from the lowest regions to the grandest and loftiest elevations.
Oh! let us be believed when we say that the first who will go into mourning for the illustrious victim of the stupid Wilkes Booth will not be the Americans who have the honor to belong to the north, for the woodman Lincoln has his successor naturally designated in the tanner Grant; it is those who have the misfortune to belong to the south, since the assassination has changed into opprobrium the prestige which at one time attached to their cause.