Papers Relating to Foreign Affairs, Accompanying the Annual Message of the President to the Second Session Thirty-eighth Congress, Part IV, Appendix to diplomatic correspondence of 1865; the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, late president of the United States of America, and the attempted assassination of William H. Seward, Secretary of State, and Frederick W. Seward, Assistant Secretary, on the evening of the 14th of April, 1865; expressions of condolence and sympathy inspired by these events

Inhabitants of Boyan-on-the-Sea

[Translation.]

Boyan-on-the-Sea, May 5, 1865.

To the United States Minister in Paris:

Frenchmen living upon the shores of the Atlantic have but to glance over the ocean, and thus feel as if they were in immediate communication with your country.

The undersigned inhabitants of Boyan, for this reason, have felt more seriously the awful event which occurred at Washington on the 14th of April last. They now meet to express their profound grief and deep indignation to the minister, the government, and the country.

We cannot help admiring the honest and much respected Abraham Lincoln, who resisted the attacks of southern fanatics, and thus created four millions of new men. We admired his calmness in the struggle, his lenity in victory, taught him in his civil education, by his religious observance of the law. And now the miserable, depraved slaveholders, capable of all crime, have cowardly deprived him of his life, and attempted that of two noble souls, Mr. Seward and his son, worthy colleagues and fellow-countrymen of the newly elected citizen President.

With firm hopes that this horrid event will serve to strengthen the Union, we ask you to receive our condolence and our cordial sympathy.

V. JOUAIN,

and forty others