[From the Carlisle Examiner, Saturday, April 29, 1865.]
the climax of infamy.
A fortnight this Saturday, when the startling news was flashed through Europe of the fall of Richmond, the telegraph was carrying to the remotest cities of the north the story of an appalling tragedy. The capital of the confederacy and the great army of the confederacy were things of the past. The former had been evacuated a fortnight—the latter had surrendered a week ago. The people were rejoicing in the overthrow of the rebellion which they had made such mighty efforts to crush, and on the advent of that reign of peace which was quickly coming with its attendant train of blessings. In the midst of their jubilations they were stricken with an awful blow. Their beloved [Page 367] President—he whose steady hand and wise brain had guided the reeling ship through the hurricane, and was but yesterday full of humane thoughts for its future career—lay dead, the victim of an infuriated assassin. Strange, is it not, that the last of the ten thousand bullets of the war should be reserved for him? But so it was. The greatest war of any time was consummated by an act to which history reveals no parallel, and which the world will regard with feelings of unutterable horror. The death of Cæsar did not come with such a shock to the assembled senators as the death of the President to his own people and to ours. The Roman had grasped power, and made the liberties of his countrymen and of alien nations subservient to his own imperial will. He lived in an age when Sic semper tyrannis was a motto which commended itself to the highest minds. Even the assassinations of William of Orange, of the Russian Paul, of Kotzebue, of Murat, of Percival, were justified by rigid philosophers, whose teachings the world has happily discarded; and the still more recent attempt on the life of Napoleon was mitigated by many who regarded him as the author of Italy’s thraldom. But Mr. Lincoln had nothing in common with any of these high objects of the assassin’s knife. He was a plain, homely man, whom the people had placed in power once, and whom they reinstated in power as the best evidence of their devotion. He had nothing of the tyrant either in his office or person. He did nothing of an extra-judicial ten dency that was not sanctioned by the Constitution and by Congress. He neither rose to power on the burning ashes of a republic which he had destroyed, nor used a victorious army to enable him to override the laws of his country. As he was at the beginning, so he was at the end. He was sworn to execute laws which bound him equally with the prairie farmer or the city storekeeper. He would have been a traitor to his oath if he had not put those laws in force against those who sought to dismember the Union he was charged to defend. He did so with a magnanimity unparalleled in the history of civil wars, for no man suffered on the scaffold for domestic treason. He brought the war to an end, and was glad of the opportunity it afforded of issuing a liberal amnesty. His generous plans have been frustrated by an event which deprives the North of a noble ruler, and the South of its best friend.
It is almost needless to go over the terrible details of Mr. Lincoln’s untimely death. He went to the theatre, accompanied by Mrs. Lincoln and a couple of friends, on the evening of the day appointed for a national thanksgiving. That, probably, explains the reason why Good Friday should have been chosen for a visit to such a place of entertainment. He was there, in his private box, shot in the head by a ruffian who had slipped in behind. He was never afterwards sensible, and died next morning. On the same night, and about the same time, an accomplice of the murderer made his way into the house of the Secretary of State. Mr. Seward was in bed, slowly recovering from his late accident. The villain rushed to the bedside, and instantly gashed his victim’s head and neck. Two of Mr. Seward’s sons were summoned by the domestics. One was knocked down with a bludgeon, and the other so terribly wounded that he was reported dead. One or two of the attendants were also so much injured as to leave little hopes of their recovery. It is doubtful, also, whether Mr. Seward will get better. It is said that Mr. Stanton, the Secretary of War, was marked by the assassins, and that General Grant, who was advertised to be at the theatre, but who did not go, was another expected victim. One of the monsters escaped, but the other was said to have been captured. They had come to Washington on horseback, and had left their horses at a livery stable.
The first question that arises on reading the particulars of this atrocious series of crimes is, were they the result of accident or premeditation, the freak of madmen or the deliberate purpose of their employers?
The madman and fanatic theory falls to the ground at once as worthless. No lunatics would have come to the city on saddle horses, separated each on his [Page 368] diabolical mission, and then run away. A fanatical patriot would have bid defiance when his revenge had been accomplished. Brutus justified his deed, and less men than Brutus, inspired with the desire to kill a tyrant, would have quietly stood their ground. Not so the villains whose object was unquestionably to murder the entire cabinet. Mr. Stanton charges the crimes against “the enemies of the country,” and says that “evidence has been obtained that these horrible crimes were committed in execution of a conspiracy deliberately planned and set on foot by rebels under pretence of avenging the South and aiding the rebel cause.” It is further stated that the murders were to have been committed in March, but were postponed “until Richmond could be heard from.”. Who were the conspirators at the rebel capital we shall probably learn before long, though they would have cunning enough to hide the written proofs of complicity. We have not the shadow of a doubt that the actual assassins were the wretched instruments of that slave power which offered rewards for the heads of the Washington government and plotted the murder of Mr. Lincoln at Baltimore in 1860. The chivalry which could starve Union prisoners to death, which could butcher negro captives, which could send out pirates to burn defenceless merchantmen, which could burn its own cities, which could break their solemn oaths and rob the public treasury, which could live in barbaric luxury on the spoils of human slavery, which could flog, imprison, and torture human beings as mere brutes, whose chief city was described by Mr. Russell, the Times correspondent, as “a hell upon earth,” whose logical weapons for settling every dispute before the war were the revolver, the bowie knife, and the pine faggot, who planned the burning of New York and murdered the citizens of St. Albans—we have no hesitation in ascribing to some of them the authorship of the black list of assassinations. It is the worst job they have taken in hand since their famous treason. It will rouse the soldiers and people of the North to exact a measure of vengeance which Mr. Lincoln was the only man able to prevent. They have sent to an untimely, but not an inglorious grave, a man whose simple, honest, grand life will place him next to Washington on the scroll of Presidents, and whose merciful nature would have stood between them and the block.