International Workingmen’s Association
Sir: The demon of the peculiar institution, for the supremacy of which the South rose in arms, would not allow his worshippers to honorably succumb in the open field. What he had begun in treason he must needs end in infamy. As Phillip Second’s war for the inquisition bred a Gerards, thus Jefferson Davis’s pro-slavery war a Booth.
It is not our part to cull words of sorrow and horror, while the heart of two worlds heaves with emotion. Even the sycophants who, year after year, and day by day, stuck to their Sisyphus work of morally assassinating Abraham Lincoln and the great republic he headed, stand now aghast at this universal outburst of popular feeling, and rival with each other to strew rhetorical flowers on his open grave. They have now at last found out that he was a man, neither to be browbeaten by adversity nor intoxicated by success—inflexibly pressing on to his great goal, never compromising it by blind haste; slowly maturing his steps, never retracing them; carried away by no surge of popular favor, disheartened by no slackening of the popular pulse; tempering stern acts by the gleams of a kind heart; illuminating scenes dark with passion by the smile of humor; doing his Titanic work as humbly and homely as heaven-born rulers do little things, with the grandiloquence of pomp and state; in one word, one of the rare men who succeed in becoming great without ceasing to be good. Such, indeed, was the modesty of this great and good man, that the world only discovered him a hero after he had fallen a martyr.
To be singled out by the side of such a chief, the second victim to the infernal gods of slavery, was an honor due to Mr. Seward. Had he not, at a time of general hesitation, the sagacity to foresee and the manliness to foretell “the irrepressible conflict?” Did he not, in the darkest hours of that conflict, prove true to the Roman duty to never despair of the republic and its stars? We earnestly hope that he and his son will be restored to health, public activity, and well deserved honors within much less than “ninety days.”
After a tremendous civil war, but which, if we consider its vast dimensions and its broad scope, and compare it to the Old World’s one hundred years’ wars, and thirty years’ wars, and twenty-three years’ wars, can hardly be said to have lasted ninety days. Yours, sir, has become the task to uproot by the law what has been felled by the sword, to preside over the arduous work of political reconstruction and social regeneration. A profound sense of your great [Page 267] mission will save you from any compromise with stern duties. You will never forget that, to initiate the new era of the emancipation of labor, the American people devolved the responsibilities of leadership upon two men of labor, the one Abraham Lincoln, the other Andrew Johnson.
Signed, on behalf of the International Working Men’s Association, by the central council:
| CHARLES KAUB. | H. CLUWOSKY. |
| EDWIN COULSON. | FERD. LESSNER. |
| JOHN WESTON. | HENRY BOLLETER. |
| CARL PFAENDER. | BENJAMIN LUCRAPT. |
| N. P. HANSEN. | JAMES BUCKLEY. |
| KARL SCHAPPER. | PETER FOX. |
| WILLIAM DELL. | N. SALVATELLA. |
| GEORGE LOCKNER. | GEORGE HOWELL. |
| GEORGE ECCARIUS. | BORDAGE. |
| JOHN ASBEUN. | A. VALTIER. |
| EMILL HATTORP, Secretary for Poland. | ROBERT SHAW. |
| KARL MARX, Secretary for Germany. | JOHN H. LONGMAID. |
| GEORGE WILLIAM WHEELER. | M. MORGAN. |
| J. WHITLOCK, Financial Secretary. | JOHN D. NICASS. |
| P. PETERSEN. | WILLIAM C. WORL SY. |
| ALO FÄNKO. | DIXON STAWTZ. |
| EUGENE DUPONT, Secretary for France. | G. T. DE LASSARIE. |
| HY JUNG, Secretary for Switzerland. | J. CARTER. |
| W. H. CREMER, Honorary General Sec’y. | G. ADGER, President. |
Andrew Johnson,
President of the United States.