[From The Leeds Mercury, Thursday, April 27, 1865.]
assassination of president lincoln.
The heart fails and the hand trembles as we record the fearful news which reaches us like a knell from the other side of the Atlantic. The North has gained [Page 412] its triumph, but the great man to whose wise counsels and brave spirit that triumph is so largely attributable lies a corpse in the capital of the States which he had once more united. On the 14th of April, on the very day after the federal flag had been triumphantly hoisted on the fort at which the first shot was fired, President Lincoln fell by the hand of an assassin. His chief Secretary of State, not yet recovered from the effects of the injury he had sustained by his recent accident, was a second victim, and was lying apparently at the point of death when the mail which brings this fatal news quitted America. God only knows to what this terrible crime may lead. For ourselves, we tremble to think of the possible consequences. In that one head and heart seemed to be shut up the better genius of the reconstructed States. There are times when the fate of even the strongest nations seems to hang upon a thread, when a little event, the murder of a single man, may determine its doom for weal or woe, almost for life or death. While the vessel is in the open sea, it can matter little whether the helm is turned a trifle too much to the right hand or to the left. But when driving through narrow and intricate channels, with dangerous banks and sharp ledges of rock on either side, the smallest mishap in the guidance of the rudder may send the vessel to destruction. God grant it may not be so with that noble vessel, which, after surviving a tempest of unparalleled fury and duration, seemed at last, in calmer seas, but through winding and difficult channels, reaching the longed-for haven! We have still faith in that large-hearted, broad-minded view which the mass of the northern people have continued to hold, even in the midst of the great agony which has convulsed the nation for the last four years. A certain amount of froth and folly there has been, as in all great disturbances, but underneath this spray of angry words and hasty counsels, the deep, strong, majestic roll of the thoughts and feelings of a mighty nation, basing its strength on justice, and animated by motives at once pure and elevated, has been visible to every discerning eye. But the greatest and wisest nation needs at the head of its executive one who can give form to its feelings and practical expression to its wishes. Lincoln has been the very man to embody the national policy at such a moment. As a lawyer, acquainted with technical forms and deeply imbued with the spirit of the written Constitution, he was admirably qualified to carry out the great half-conservative, half-revolutionary work of reconstructing the nation on the old basis, made new by the excision of slavery, without shocking those prejudices or violating those principles to which the American mind always clings with such peculiar tenacity. As a man of great good sense and cool judgment he was able to read the signs of the age with more clearness than most of his contemporaries, and thus acquired the rare faculty of not only doing the right thing, but of doing the right thing at the right time. His great resolution, shown by his unflinching firmness of purpose during four of the most eventful years in the world’s history, would have enabled him steadily to pursue his wise and benevolent purpose amid all the conflict of opinions and the confusion of counsels by which he was surrounded. Lastly, his large-hearted philanthropy, the truly patriotic and Christian spirit in which he has ever viewed this great national crisis, would have shut out any fear of that bloody retribution which in almost any other country, and in any other age, would have visited the leaders, and perhaps even the people, of the revolted States. Was ever such a man cut off at such a season? Truly it may be said in this case that “man proposes, but God disposes.” The prop and hope of the nation suddenly broken. The destroyer of his country’s peace marked out by the popular voice for forgiveness; its restorer struck down by the shaft of a vengeance which counted everything noble and good its mortal foe, a vengeance which we earnestly pray may not bring down a fearful retribution on the heads of those in whose supposed interest the blow was struck.
President Lincoln’s career has been one of the most remarkable ever recorded. Born in Kentucky; educated, so far as he was educated at all, in Indiana; in [Page 413] youth settled in the recently formed State of Illinois—he spent his whole life far away from the refining influences of large cities and polished society. Uncouth in figure, plain in features, endowed with neither the natural advantage of a good address nor the derived advantage of a careful education—an orator only in the greatness of his thoughts, not in the purity of his language, the poetry of his ideas, or the graces of his manner—modest in demeanor, utterly averse to all ostentation or idle display—he seemed the very last, man in the United States likely to captivate the multitude, or to win the lofty position to which he was twice elected, and from which he has now at length been deposed by the hand of the great leveller. The speeches which won him so high a reputation as to suggest his name for the Presidency of the Union are not speeches which in this country would be called fine or eloquent; still less are they speeches of the kind usually supposed to constitute the staple of American Oratory. The crowds which flocked from all parts of Illinois to hear his great encounters with the celebrated Douglas, the crowds which filled the Cooper Institute when he addressed the republicans of New York after the canvass of his own State, were not drawn by any hope of listening to withering invective, exquisite humor, delicate pathos, grand bursts of oratorical splendor, or loud-sounding praises of the country and flattery of the national prejudices. Never were speeches more devoid of clap-trap. He treats his opponent with a calm respect and courtesy from which neither the sarcasms with which he was attacked nor the growing warmth of the contest ever induced him to swerve. He dealt with slavery as one who strongly disapproved it, but was prepared to leave it wherever it constitutionally existed, and was never for a moment led to confound the system with the men, or to denounce the slaveholders in the language of indignation and invective. For the rest, his speeches are remarkable only for the clear, broad definition of constitutional principles, the unerring logic with which he applies these principles to existing facts, and the startling fairness and candor with which he always states the arguments of his opponents. Many men can speak eloquently who cannot act wisely. But no man ever spoke with the sound sense, clearness of view, and definiteness of purpose which mark his speeches, without having the wisdom which will make him great in action. His speeches are a photograph of his character. Full of transparent honesty and candor; without the smallest infusion of political rancor or personal vanity; singular in their forgetfulness of self, singular in their devotion to the cause of truth; never skimming the surface, but always grappling fairly with the whole question at issue; never shirking difficulties or shrinking from admissions, but meeting the one, and making the other, as calmly as if they were a part of his own case; overflowing with great thoughts, and strong in manly sense, which the very boldness of expression seemed, like the severe simplicity of the Egyptian architecture, to set off in more massive proportions Such were his speeches; such was his mind; such, too, was his policy.
Apart from the future, there is something singularly affecting in his murder at this particular crisis. His great work of crushing the rebellion, a work especially uncongenial to such a spirit, at last accomplished; the bright dawn of peace already breaking, and his heart beginning to expand to the happier duties which seemed now about to engage his attention; the dark frown vanishing from his brow, and the smile of gentle loving welcome beginning to play upon his features; all that was necessarily stern and repulsive in the character of his administration clearing away, and sunshine and brightness bursting out over the scene; at such a moment to be quenched in terrible, total, sudden eclipse! It is indeed a hard fate. And by whom was this ever-detestable crime, which will rank its authors with the worst assassins in history—with the murderers of William of Orange and of Henry IV of France—by whom was this act of hideous wickedness committed? By the South we cannot and will not say. With all its crimes, the nation which produced Lee and [Page 414] Jackson cannot be chargeable with such a deed. But by a party, a faction, a knot of dark, cowardly assassins in the south, whose names and numbers it is impossible yet to know. Yes, it was the moment when his mind was revolving schemes of reconstruction and reconciliation, when his heart was yearning to forgive all that it had suffered, when peace was in all his thoughts and mercy in all his words, that this treacherous blow was aimed at his life. His great work was cut short, its sadder features alone brought to light, its brighter hidden and now blotted out forever. But posterity will give him his due. It will tell that though his work was bloody his heart was kind; it will tell with what joy he was preparing to cast aside the sword, and welcome back those who had forced him to use it; it will tell how he loved peace, how he sought it, and how, when it seemed on the point of coming, when his arms were stretched out to welcome it, he fell dead, struck down by a murderous hand, at the post of duty and of honor. It will tell, too—and distant generations will repeat the story with growing enthusiasm—how, before his day’s toil was done, the colossal fabric of negro slavery had been shivered to its base. For this he lived. His work accomplished in the appointed way, he met his tragic end. While the echo of joyful salvoes was yet ringing in his ears, joyful to him more because they heralded peace than because they celebrated victory, he passed away—leaving the world half stupefied with the horror of the crime and the magnitude of the loss.
History, which embalms few reputations so spotless and so sacred as his, will do justice to his memory. The present generation, and especially his own countrymen, can best mark their sense of his worth by following in his footsteps. In the few dignified words which he so lately uttered when asked to consecrate the cemetery of the heroes who fell at Gettysburg, President Lincoln said, “It is not we that consecrate them, but they that consecrate us.” May his own memory consecrate the great nation it was his lot to rule. His successor is unfortunately very unfavorably known, and is certainly not the person we should like to see in the place of the great statesman whose offiee he how holds. But Andrew Johnson, with all his faults, is not a man without abilities or without virtues. His words on accepting the new office were words indicating a due sense of the solemn nature of the duties he is called upon to perform. With a cabinet trained to official duties under his noble predecessor, with a people resolute in maintaining the wise and moderate policy to which they have so magnanimously adhered, there is no reason to despair of the prospects of the federal States. They have had a fearful loss, but the greatness of Lincoln was that he embodied the public feeling, not at all that he created it. In a free state this feeling will find its natural expression, and Lincoln’s work may survive, and Lincoln’s spirit may still rule, though his voice is quenched in the silence of death, and a bleeding nation mourns over his tomb. It may well mourn—but it may also rejoice. In that tomb lies the corpse of slavery.