[From the Dublin Daily Express, Saturday, April 29, 1865.]
The meeting convened for to-day is one in the objects of which all Irishmen, whatever their politics and whatever their predilections, will combine. The assassination of President Lincoln is, without doubt, the most horrible catastrophe which has occurred within the memory of man. Nay, it is even doubtful whether, in order to find its perfect parallel, we must not go back eighteen hundred years or more, and revert to the assassination of the first Cæsar. The feeling with which the intelligence was received when the first vague sense of incredulity had passed away was one of overpowering sorrow. It was as though there were some great danger impending, some great personal bereavement to be endured, some vague and indefeasible horror to be undergone. The feeling was enhanced by the consciousness that we had not done justice to the character or fairly estimated the career of the murdered statesman. We were all of us familiar with the descriptions of the homely and ungainly man—the man that, born and bred a peasant, had carried, in some respects, the manners of a peasant into the lofty station which by his energy of character he had achieved. But we were only beginning to appreciate the homely common sense which had guided him where mere astuteness would have failed—the homely honesty which in a community where political honesty is rare, had secured him the name of “Honest Abe,” the gentle, affectionate disposition which in the moment of triumph was ready to forget the past, and, in a broad spirit of philanthropy, to receive back his most deadly enemies as countrymen and friends.
The loss of President Lincoln is great, but we must beware of exaggerating its greatness. The murdered statesman was not what is sometimes called “a necessary man.” If the Emperor of the French were to be assassinated, his dynasty would in all probability be ended, France would be in a revolution, and all Europe would be shaken to its centre. The assassination of the President of the United States will, as far as we can forecast the future, be attended with no such terrible results, and the reason is easily to be discovered. In the one case the nation is the creature of the man, in the other the man was the creature of the nation. The Emperor is himself the empire. The French government is the realization of his ideal. He has impressed his individuality on France. The [Page 371] French people are not only ruled, they are governed, and animated, and impelled by him. The case was different with the murdered President. He was not a man of preconceived ideas and predetermined plans. Though he marched with unfaltering step at the head of American opinion, he can scarcely be said to have even led it. The nation urged him onward. The national thought inspired, the national energy impelled him. The nation found in him its representative, its embodiment, its chief. And here is to be found at once his true merit as a statesman and the explanation of the fact that he was not indispensably necessary to the States. If he was not in advance, he was never in arrear of public opinion. He yielded freely to the pressure from behind. Urged onward by the nation, he pushed towards the end he did not see with honest purpose and unshaken courage. But his range of vision widened as he advanced. Dangers disappeared and difficulties cleared before him. At the outset of his eventful presidency he was scared at the prospect of secession. Secession, he said, was never contemplated by the Constitution, and the Constitution gave him no power of coercing a seceding State. For the moment the strong man seemed paralyzed. But Sumter was taken, and the national spirit was aroused. The nation rushed to arms, and the President caught the spirit of the nation and took his natural position at its head. Then came dark days of humiliation and disaster. Army after army was defeated. General after general was deposed. But the heart of the President never failed him, and the nation’s spirit rose higher the lower that its fortunes sank. There was aroused throughout the North a firmer determination to sacrifice everything and to suffer anything rather than abandon its destiny and renounce its place among the nations. Then, for the first time, came the thought that the negro might be emancipated, not, it is true, in obedience to the dictates of religion, not in the interests of humanity, but as a military expedient to meet the stern exigencies of the war. The sentiment of the nation once more found expression in the homely words of its elect. If by maintaining slavery, he said, he could maintain the Union, he would maintain it; if by abolishing slavery he could maintain the Union, he would abolish it. His great, his only object was the Union. But it soon became apparent that the maintenance of slavery would not maintain the Union, and then arose a fierce, loud cry for abolition; a cry in which were mingled the discordant voices of humanity, and wordly wisdom, and political rancor, and unrelenting war. The time was at length come; the President at length pronounced his emancipation proclamation, and slavery as an institution perished in the war which it had evoked. Then came the hour of triumph. Fortune had changed, the tide had turned, the hour of darkness had passed away. Then followed in quick succession the march of Sherman, the capitulation of Savannah, the storming of the lines before Petersburg, the capture of Richmond, the surrender of Lee, the virtual suppression of the great pro-slavery rebellion. But new tasks awaited the saviour of the republic. The Union was to be reconstructed; a torn confederation of States was to be consolidated into a single nation. The element of division and disorder had disappeared with slavery, and the Constitution was to be remodelled to meet the exigencies of the new development of national existence. The pacification of the South, the determination of the future status of the blacks, the disbandment of the army, the consolidation of the debt, and the, restoration of finances—these and a thousand other labors awaited the calm sagacity and moderate counsels of the homely statesman. But his hour was come. He was to be cut off in the midst of his triumph. His country was to lose him. In one sense it is an irreparable loss; but the nation survives, though the individual is dead, and the high qualities which have carried the American people through the terrible ordeal of war will, we doubt not, carry it through the ordeal—less terrible, perhaps, but equally trying—of approaching peace. The spirit of the nation now, as heretofore, will animate the spirit of its statesmen and its generals, and mould them to its will. [Page 372] Grant is still at the head of the army of the Potomac, and the death of the President can exert no influence on the conduct of the war. Slavery perished in the lifetime of the murdered man, and cannot be resuscitated by his murder. The consolidation of the confederacy of independent States into a nation will be the work of time, but the process has commenced and cannot be arrested even by an assassination. The only peril with which America is really menaced by the catastrophe which has occurred is a reaction of popular sentiment against the South. The hand of the assassin has destroyed the man of moderate counsels and kindly heart, and those who have succeeded to his place have not, we fear, inherited his virtues. There is, in truth, peril. As for ourselves, the deplorable event which has occurred has been attended with at least one poor consolation and advantage. The universal horror which the intelligence of this foul assassination has evoked, the universal sympathy with the American people in its great bereavement which it has elicited, will go far in the mind of a generous nation to obliterate all those angry feelings which necessary policy and unfortunate accidents have engendered. And the report of the proceedings of the multitude of public meetings throughout the length and breadth of the land, such as that which will be assembled to-day in Dublin, will prove to the American people that, whatever may have been our want of appreciation of the living, we honor and revere the dead, and cherish the memory of the second Washington