Athenaeum Club, New York City, New York
Pursuant to adjournment the club assembled at 8 o’clock p. m., the president in the chair. The proceedings of the previous meeting were read and approved.
Mr. T. Bailey Myers, chairman of the committee on resolutions, prefaced their introduction with the following remarks:
Mr. President: The duty has been devolved upon me of submitting to the club resolutions feebly expressing our sympathy in this great national bereavement. It would appear eminently proper that we should participate in the public grief over our fallen leader. We have sympathized in his struggles; have appreciated his exertions and his sacrifices; and now that he has crowned them with his life, it is just that we should lay our humble tribute on his bloody tomb. We all recollect how doubtfully his first inauguration was received; how many of us distrusted his ability to cope with the southern people, goaded into a bitter hatred of the North, under the lash of their unscrupulous leaders. We remember, too, how the heart of the nation rose when he proclaimed that the unity of the States should be preserved. We had doubted, under the feeble administration of his predecessor, whether we were a nation or a temporary consolidation of communities, to be broken at will by any factious member. We realized when the cannon thundered before Sumter that we still possessed the love of country and the disposition to save it at any cost which were necessary to insure that end. We had rung conciliation, compromise and concession through all their phases; had hesitated at coercion; but now we recognized [Page 682] subjugation if necessary, as preferable to annihilation held one more Union-saving meeting, threw down the olive-branch and drew the sword. Party preferences forgotten, a whole people rushed to arms and accepted Abraham Lincoln as their leader.
Clubs are little worlds in themselves. Each member brings to a common centre his prejudices and his sympathies, his intelligence in discussion, and his candor in accepting conviction. The clubs of New York, as organized bodies of intelligent men, at once became the centre of patriotic activity, and much good was done in those early days, and many a man buckled on his sword, took up his pen, or arrayed himself actively and usefully in the great cause inspired by the convictions ripened by club discussion.
The Athenaeum, sir, was not behind in this great work, and she can point with pride to a long list of members who have done good service in the field, in the study, or in the councils of the nation.
We can recall how intently those who found no better opportunity in active exertion, watched the struggle and followed the progress of our armies, with their flag markers, on the map, as they slowly progressed on the borders of the dark region of secession—grand enough to form the area of an empire—dark enough for the ante-chamber of Hades. The news from the army was received with intense anxiety; we mourned over their reverses; we rejoiced in their triumphs We fought their battles over again; canvassed private information and private reports, and sometimes accepted probabilities for results, and rumors for facts, often to be disappointed. We had our favorite generals and our prejudices against generals, and discussed the merits of Butler, (first in the field,) McClellan, Frémont, McDowell, Pope, Burnside, Rosecrans, Sherman, Thomas, Sheridan, and Grant, as each in turn assumed a prominent place. Perhaps we had a stronger bias for our own three major generals in the field, and a warmer desire that opportunity should be given to them than to others, not only because they were Athenaeum men, but because they had distinguished themselves in many a desperate struggle. Nor were our naval heroes overlooked in the councils of the club, or their brilliant achievements forgotten. With them to engage was to succeed, and a battle was almost invariably a victory.
Perhaps these easy chair criticisms of more earnest patriots who fought and suffered while we were discussing their efforts in a peaceful seclusion from the din of battle, to which we were indebted to their valor, might argue indifference to the mighty events which were passing around us; but while it was not possible for all to participate, it is but just to believe that many reluctantly accepted inaction as a necessity. To discuss and read the newspapers are pure American characteristics. The deliberations of the Athenaeum were but typical of those of all circles at home, and of the cabinets and people of every civilized nation of the globe. The institutions of a mighty nation were on their trial, and the question of self-government to be passed upon. Well might those not battling for them watch and pray!
Meanwhile four years were dragging slowly on. The hand on the dial seemed leaden in its course. The hope of peace often apparently near at hand, still intangible and remote.
In all this period there was a patient, hopeful, earnest man, gifted with a clear perception, and an honest patriotic heart, struggling at the national capital, often within sound of the enemy’s cannon, at once the ruler and the servant of the people. To him years were but as days in preserving the life of the nation; he stopped at no labor, he complained of no fatigue, he shunned no responsibility; his only recreation seemed to be the indulgence of a quaint humor in an occasional epigram or joke, which served to show how light his heart was in his good work. We have heard of no jokes made by Jefferson Davis in the course of this war. He has lived to realize in the very existence of his paper fabric of a confederacy, the saddest burlesque of the century.
[Page 683]The exertions of Mr. Lincoln, and the immense labors thrown upon him in these years, those who have witnessed them can scarcely realize, and they will be but faintly portrayed when the history of the struggle is written. He had to organize a government, an army, a navy, a treasury; to select his co-laborers; to reconcile their jealousies; to harmonize discordant factions; to satisfy grasping place-seekers; to decide on such vexed questions of policy at home and abroad, as had never been passed upon by any of his predecessors. He had to reward the deserving; encourage the desponding; temper the zeal of the too confident; replenish and protect the treasury; claim the services and the blood of new levies; and carry on, often upon his own responsibility, a war the most gigantic in the history of the world. Who could wonder that he made occasional errors, or that the people sometimes complained of his policy?
But when his course was passed upon by the people, his re-election proved to the North that his general policy was sanctioned, and that they were ready to carry on the war if it lasted four years longer, aye, or forty years longer, until the great result was gained.
It proved to the South that there was no escape for them in empty truce or hollow compromise; that Lincoln had promised that he would repossess our forts and public places, and restore every star to our flag, and that promise was about to be fulfilled. Lincoln was re-elected; Sherman was advancing; Grant stood firm before Richmond, after refusing to recognize defeat, and the anaconda was winding itself slowly around the body of the beast.
At length came the crowning success—Richmond had fallen! and Lincoln was in person in the rebel capital, intent, with the generous impulse of a noble heart, to check the carnage and protect the fallen foe. Scarcely returned from that mission of mercy the felon blow was struck which calls forth a nation’s grief.
Had he fallen by the hand of an unyielding rebel on his entry into the capital there would have been some palliation for the act in the voluntary risk he assumed, but to strike him unarmed and unprotected, in the bosom of his family, in a place of amusement where he had gone as a simple American citizen, unprotected by the guard his rank could have claimed, and the value of his life to the people required, was to take advantage in his confiding nature; and in his act the assassin displayed the utter baseness and depravity of his nature, and the horrible teachings of the fallen cause he sought to sustain by murder.
It will be said, sir, that his act was not justified by the whole southern people; and there will doubtless be those there who will denounce it as a crime and despise the assassin, but there will be many to exult in Lincoln’s fall, and would more if he he had not lived to inaugurate measures of forgiveness which they will fear his successor may not carry out. The claim of the South to represent the second age of chivalry has departed. A gentle heart was as necessary to it as gentle blood. Such a heart beat in the bosom of Abraham Lincoln, and it beat long enough, after humbling the haughty and setting their bondsmen free, in turn to temper his treatment to the vanquished with mercy, and allow his captives to depart in safety, each with the free gift of his charger and his sword. Chivalry had no nobler achievement or more gentle courtesy than this. Contrast it with Libby prison, and the prison pens of the remote South, where our brother members have participated in southern hospitality. They were not arranged after the fashion of chivalric receptions of a fallen foe. There was little of chivalry in the massacre at Fort Pillow. We have no record of threats to “cut out the hearts;” no minute descriptions of curious knives to disembowel an adversary; no shell hidden in coal-bunkers; no theory of starving a captured foeman into a non-combatant in the pages of Froissart or Monstrelet. It is to the savage teaching of secession and not of chivalry that we are indebted that we have to-day a wide house of mourning in our land, and a martyred successor of Washington in our annals.
[Page 684]On behalf of the committee I offer the following resolutions:
Whereas Providence has permitted in its wisdom that the President of the United States should fall by an assassin’s blow, aimed at the dignity of the nation, the Athenaeum Club, recognizing the loss which they have sustained in common with their fellow-citizens, do
Resolve, That we recognize in the life of our lamented Chief Magistrate the patient and untiring efforts of a noble, magnanimous and patriotic heart to restore to its integrity a nation over which it was his fortune to be called to preside, when divided and torn by a rebellion more savage and vindictive than any known in the history of the world; and that in his death we have witnessed a martyrdom to those efforts which turned against his life the fangs of the serpent which he had torn from the heart of his country.
That in his efforts to achieve this great work he has displayed a patriotic perseverance and an ardent desire to restore the Union with as little distress as was practicable, even to those misguided men who, from motives of personal ambition, have striven with a fiendish malignity to destroy what their fathers created.
That at the moment of his death he had fully accomplished what he had so long struggled for with varied success, earning a reward only second to that bestowed upon the Father of his Country, and leaving it to his successor to deal with the leaders of this vile conspiracy, and to reorganize and protect their misguided followers under the protection of the old flag.
Resolved, That in the manner of his death we witness the results of the teachings of secession, and how they have succeeded “in firing the southern heart,” as manifested in the bitter hatred which has been displayed by the rebels in all their acts; and that in the assassination of one so genial, so kindly and so generous, at the very moment when he was standing between the defeated and prostrate traitors and the indignation of an outraged people, will, when consciousness returns to these misguided men, teach them that they have more to regret in his death than those who have, under the Constitution, recognized his administration and strengthened his hands. As Moses from the top of Pisgah beheld the promised land, he was permitted to view the coming restoration of the Union of the States and the triumph of the laws, for which he had patiently labored through four tempestuous years, before his eyes were closed in death.
Resolved, That we tender the expression of our deep sympathy to the family of the late President and to our fellow-citizens.
Resolved, That the club-house be draped in black, and that the members wear the ordinary badge of mourning for thirty days.
Resolved, That we tender our profound sympathy to the Secretary of State and to the Assistant Secretary in the dastardly assault committed upon them, and our contempt for the cowardice manifested in attacking a man while confined to a bed of sickness; and we trust that Providence will speedily restore them to health and to their patriotic duties.
Mr. Park Goodwin, in seconding the resolutions, said:
Mr. President and Gentlemen: How grand and how glorious yet how terrible the times in which we are permitted to live! How profound and various the emotions that alternately depress and thrill our hearts—like these April skies, now all smiles and now all tears. Within a week—the Holy Week as it is called in the rubrics of our churches—we have had our triumphal entries amid the waving of the palms of peace; we have had our dread Friday of crucifixion; we have had, too, in the recently renewed patriotism of the nation, a resurrection of a new and better life! [Sensation.]
It seems but a day or two since we listened to the music of the glad and festive parade; we saw the banners of our pride waving in beauty in every air, their stars bright as the stars of the morning, and their rays of white and red, [Page 685] like the beams of the rainbow, telling that the tempest was past. We pressed hands and hurrahed, and grew almost delirious with the joy that peace had come, that unity was secured, that liberty and justice, like the cherubim of the ark, would stretch their wings over the altars of our country, and stand forever as the guardian angels of her sanctity and glory. [Applause.]
But now these exultant strains are changed into the dull and heavy toll of bells; these flags are folded and draped in the emblems of mourning, and our hearts, giving forth no more the cheering shouts of victory, are despondent and full of sadness. The great captain of our cause, the commander-in-chief of our armies and navies, the President of our civic councils, the centre and director of movements, this true son of the people—once the poor, flat-boatman, the village lawyer that was, the raw, uncouth yet unsophisticated child of our American society and institutions, whom that society and those institutions had lifted out of his low estate to the foremost dignity of the world—Abraham Lincoln, smitten by the basest hand ever upraised against human innocence, is gone, gone, gone! He, who had borne the heaviest of the brunt in our four long years of war; whose pulse beat livelier; whose eyes danced brighter than any others when
—“The storm drew off,
In scattered thunders groaning round the hills,”
Our feelings are now too deep to ask or warrant any attempt at an analysis of
the character of the services of the man whose loss we deplore. Standing
over his bier, looking down almost into the tomb to which he must shortly be
consigned, we are conscious only of our grief. We know that one who was
great in himself, as well as by position, has suddenly departed. There is
something startling, ghastly, awful in the manner of his going off. But the
chief poignancy of our distress is not for greatness fallen, but for the
goodness lost. Presidents have died before; during this bloody war we have
lost many eminent generals—Lyon, Baker, Kearney, Sedgwick, Mitchell, and
others; we have lost lately our finest scholar, publicist, orator—
Would you know what Lincoln was? Look at this vast metropolis, covered with the habiliments of woe. Never in human history has there been so universal, so spontaneous, so profound an expression of a nation’s bereavement. In all our churches, without distinction of sect; in all our journals, without distinction of party; in all our workshops, in all our counting-houses, from the stateliest mansion to the lowliest hovel, you hear but the one utterance—you see but the one emblem of sorrow. Why has the death of Abraham Lincoln taken such deep hold of every class? Partly, no doubt, because of the awful and atrocious method of his death; partly because he was our Chief Magistrate; but mainly, I think, because through all his public functions there shone the fact that he was a wise and good man; a kindly, honest, noble man; a man in whom the people recognized their own better qualities; whom they, whatever their political convictions, trusted; whom they respected; whom they loved; a man as pure of heart, as patriotic of impulse; as patient, gentle, sweet, and lovely of nature, as ever history lifted out of the sphere of the domestic affections to enshrine forever in the affections of the world. [Loud and continuous applause.]
[Page 686]Yet we sorrow not as those who are without hope. Our chief has gone, but our
cause remains, dearer to our hearts because he has now become its martyr;
consecrated by his sacrifice; more widely accepted by all parties, and
fragrant and lovely forevermore in the memories of all the good and the
great of all lands, and for all time. The rebellion, which began in the
blackest treachery, to be ended in the foulest assassination—for, as
Shakspeare says,
Cold-blooded, but impotent, and defeated in its own purposes. The frenzied hand which slew the head of the government, in the mad hope of paralyzing its functions, only drew the hearts of the people together more closely to strengthen and sustain its power. All the North once more, without party or division, clenches hands around the common altar; all the North swears a more earnest fidelity to freedom; all the North again presents its breasts as the living shield and bulwark of the nation’s unity and life. Oh, foolish and wicked dream! oh, insanity of fanaticism! oh, blindness of black hate, to think that this majestic temple of human liberty, with its clustered columns of free and prosperous States, and whose base is as broad as the continent, could be shaken to pieces by striking off the ornaments of its capital! No; this nation lives, not in one man, nor in an hundred men, however eminent, however able, however endeared to us, but in the affections, the virtues, the energies, and the will of the whole American people. It has perpetual succession; not like a dynasty, in the line of its rulers, but in the line of its masses. They are always alive; they are always present to empower its acts, and to impart an unceasing vitality to its institutions. No maniac’s blade, no traitor’s bullet, shall ever penetrate that heart, for it is immortal, like the substance of Milton’s angels, and can only “by annihilating die.” [Applause.]
These sudden visitations of Providence, these mysterious and fearful vicissitudes in the destinies of nations and individuals, always seem to our shortsighted human wisdom as inscrutable; nor would it be less than presumption in any one to attempt to interpret the meaning of the Divine Mind in this late and most appalling affliction. God, as he passes, the Scriptures tell us, can only be seen from behind—can only be seen when events have gone by. Until then, we grope in darkness; we guess at best but dimly; we more often muse in mere mute wonder and awe. Yet it is always permitted us to extract such good as we may from his seeming frowns and judgments. Thus I discern in the removal of Mr. Lincoln, lamentable and horrible as it was in its circumstances, some reasons for a calm and hopeful submission to the Divine will. I can see how our nation is cemented by its tears into a more universal and affectionate brotherhood; I can see how the proclamation of freedom must become the eternal law of our hearts, if not of the land, through the martyrdom and canonization of its author; I can see how the atrocious crime of assassination must tear away from the rebellion every friend that it had left in the civilized world abroad; and I can see how the successor of Mr. Lincoln, a southern man, known to the southern people by the fact of his origin and principles, not amenable to the prejudices knotted and gnarled about Mr. Lincoln, shall undermine the supremacy of the southern leaders, and reconcile the deluded masses more rapidly than any acts of amnesty or promises of forgiveness. [Cheers.]
But what impresses me most forcibly in all this business is the new demonstration [Page 687] that it has given of the inherent strength and elasticity of democratic government. We have conducted the most stupendous war ever undertaken—a war that involved the blockade of six thousand miles of seacoast, the defence of two thousand miles of frontier, the clearing and holding of the second largest river of the globe, and the occupation of a territory greater than all Europe, (without Russia,) not only energetically, but successfully. We have done it without abandoning, or vitiating, or dislocating any of our fundamental institutions; for in the midst of this gigantic convulsion, we carried on a political canvass and a presidential election as quietly as they choose a beadle or a churchwarden elsewhere; and now we have our principal men of office killed or disabled and the government goes on without a jar, and society moves in its appointed way without a ripple of outbreak or disorder. Oh, yes, Americans, our good ship of state, which the tempests assail with their wild fury, which the angry surges lift in their arms that they may drop her into the yawning gulf, which the treacherous hidden rocks below grind and torture, yet sails on securely to her destined port, and when the very prince of the power of the air smites her captain at the helm and the first mate in his berth, she still sails on securely to her destined port, for her crew is still there; they know her bearings, and will steer right on by the compass of eternal justice and under the celestial light of liberty.
Mr. George D. Putnam sustained the resolutions as follows:
Mr. President: It may be presumptuous, especially for one who has no power as a speaker, to add anything to the forcible remarks of the gentleman who have already spoken. I would, with deference, merely refer to one or two thoughts which have been already expressed.
Mr. Goodwin has well said, that even in this overwhelming calamity, and amidst this deeply affecting spectacle of a great nation in tears for the loss of its loved and honored chief, we do not sorrow as those who have no hope. May it not be, sir, that the beneficent Ruler of the universe has permitted this heavy blow to be struck for his own wise and merciful purposes of permanent good to this nation; that this crowning bereavement, like many lesser disasters throughout the great struggle of these troublous and fruitful years, may prove to have been needful for our national salvation and national purification? May it not prove that there was danger of too much leniency and forbearance to traitors, and that God would teach us that justice must not be wholly superseded even by benignant mercy? Is not our new President right in saying that, in the present position of this nation, indulgence to leading traitors may be cruelty to the state?
For one, sir, I must confess a mortal repugnance to bloody revenge, and I believe the worst use you can make of a man is to hang him. I would give full force to all those considerations which are rightly urged against vindictive retaliation, even for the crimes of the authors and leaders of this foul rebellion. The spirit of our Saviour’s teachings should govern this people as well as the law from Mount Sinai. But, sir, what can any one of us ask or expect of our government in disposing of the responsible leaders of the late audacious and wicked conspiracy against the life of a nation, the torturers and butchers of our prisoners, and the authors at least of the teachings which have prompted the attempt at midnight murder of thousands of peaceable women and children in our cities, and now the dastardly assassination of the great and good chief of the nation? Can we expect that these criminals (wherever the difficult line may be drawn) shall suffer less than permanent expatriation from the land they have steeped in blood and covered with the graves of tens of thousands of martyrs to “their unholy, selfish, reckless ambition?
If we say nothing of the shining marks—the nobler victims of the war itself—the Elsworths, the Lowells, the Sedgwicks, the Winthrops, the Wadsworths— [Page 688] who have fallen in the field—can we again welcome to honorable citizenship the men who either directed or countenanced the doings at Fort Pillow, at Laurence, at Salisbury, and Andersonville?
Sir, we are glad to believe, whatever may have been previous impressions, that in our new President we have a man of nerve, of integrity, and of ability, who will not shrink from the duties devolving upon him; but will administer justice in no spirit of mean revenge, but as the executive agent of a great people, who have earned by their best blood the right, under God’s blessing, of future security and permanent peace.
We are willing to believe that he, too, as well as his martyred predecessor, has been fitted by the Almighty, over and above all defects of education, or the personal associations of a slave State, for the momentous duties of the hour, upon which depends the future of this continent.
Glance back a few years, nay a few months; the suggestions of experience, the wonderful teachings of Providence, which crowd upon us as we look at past events, would fill volumes. I do not presume to detain you; but just think of Abraham Lincoln, legally, rightfully chosen though he was for his high office, yet obliged to reach the capital almost as a fugitive, in disguise. Think of the then current jeers about “Old Abe, the rail-splitter,” “the buffoon,” “the ape,” not so-called only by southern rebels, but openly in the streets of New York. Think of the amazing task which lay before this untried lawyer of a western village. Think of his difficulties and discouragements, not from open foes alone, but from professed friends, his own party supporters, almost deserting him, as unequal to the crisis, and calling for a “dictator.” Think of the fact that his wisdom and ability were thus doubted, not merely in the first year of repulses and disasters, but that, even within the last eight months, some of the most active republicans were busily planning to supersede him as the “weakest candidate” for the succession. Consider the harrassing pressure upon him by visionary or selfish friends for widely opposite and variously doubtful schemes of public policy; consider his quiet patience, his quiet energy, his modest and kindly bearing to all, his sublime and enduring faith in the God of justice and of mercy! And now that his bodily presence with us has ceased forever, look around and see this great city, nay almost every habitation in the land, literally draped in mourning—not dictated by imperial edict, but the spontaneous symbol of a deep and earnest sorrow, shared, let us believe sincerely, by thousands who had hitherto reviled, while they secretly must have respected and admired this “true man of the people.” Observe men of all shades of opinion and faith lauding his virtues, doing homage to his noble patriotism, his immortal services to the people he loved so well.
Has any one of us walked our streets since Saturday without having tears rise unbidden at these spontaneous tokens of heartfelt affection and respect for our late President? Has the world ever seen a spectacle more touching, more worthy of a free people? Suppose he had lived a few weeks longer to see the full consummation of that glad time when the old flag, waving in every city and village over the broad land, is again acknowledged and respected and loved as the symbol of a great nationality, governed by the eternal principles of justice, and enjoying the blessings of freedom in peace and prosperity; suppose this new era had fully dawned, and Abraham Lincoln, the rail-splitter, had again visited our great cities, what would have been his reception? But he was permitted to reach only the near view of this glorious result of all his patient toil and quiet faith now so well assured.
It has been well said, also, by Mr. Goodwin that this event leaves a great lesson, and a cause for national gratitude amidst our grief, in the proof it has given the world of the stability of our institutions. Shrewd and judicious, though perhaps over-timid, men feared at first that a blow so startling must be followed by distrust, confusion, anarchy. But the wheels of government have moved [Page 689] steadily and serenely on, the gold thermometer of Wall street was scarcely disturbed by a fraction, and on the Saturday which proclaimed the national calamity, and while the nation was almost paralyzed with horror at the parricide, the nation’s popular loan received larger subscriptions than ever before. The confidence of the people was firm and unshaken. Well may we look at the bow of promise, even now visible over the heavy cloud of affliction. Well may we believe that the tears now mingled over the bier of the last great victim of the expiring monsters, slavery and treason, with the blood of the noble army of martyrs who have gone before, will together unite the hearts of this great people, purified and renovated, and rising, as in the resurrection morning, to a future life of happiness and peace. For well it is already written of Abraham Lincoln:
Mr. W. Cary Smith followed with these remarks:
Mr. President: I have a natural hesitancy in rising to speak at such a time, while your minds are still under the spell of the eloquent words to which you have just listened. But as it has been thought well that there should be some expression on the part of the younger members of the club, I beg your indulgence for a moment.
Sir, the President of the United States has fallen by the hands of an aasassin. Such an announcement needs no remarks. For a period of two hundred and twenty-five years no such event has occurred. For the first time in all the many vehement and heated struggles of our national history, political animosity and partisan hate, defeated at the ballot-box and in the field, has vented its baffled rage in the perpetration of a crime at which the civilization of the age stands appalled, a crime against humanity and Christianity, against man and against God.
This is no natural out growth of our American institutions. But it becomes us, as citizens of a common country, to consider well whether there be anything in the social organization of any portion of it favorable to the engendering of such a moral monster as the doer of this deed; any habits of thought, of action, any tone of feeling pervading a community of which this crowning iniquity is a legitimate expression. I desire to avoid offence; but, sir, as a southerner by birth, I maintain, and it cannot be denied, that there is a portion of this land, whose leaders, grown rich on the unrequited toil of bondsmen, yet claiming to be a chivalric nation of gentlemen, have openly advocated this deed, the very shadow of whose monstrous iniquity darkens the heavens.
It cannot be denied that this assassin can look for approval, for aid, for protection in no part of Christendom save in the limits of that section of the Union so recently in rebellion against the government.
The responsibility of this crime is justly chargeable upon the South. Their so-called domestic institutions and their leaders stand to-day arraigned at the bar of the civilized world as criminal against the rights of mankind.
It is our duty to see to it that the last vestige of this barbarism be eradicated. We owe it to ourselves, to posterity, to liberty, never to pause, to rest, nor to falter till the land be purged.
In view of the humble origin of the late President, of his upright character, of his inestimable services, let no man despair of the safety of this republic. The unbroken civil order maintained during the shock which followed his untimely death, fully vindicates the majesty of popular government.
The blow which reft his life dissipated in an instant the vapors of prejudice [Page 690] and partisan misrepresentations which endeavored to impede his progress. His place in history is henceforth secure; the memory of his just deeds immortal.
His body mingles with the sacred ashes of those over whom a nation watches with jealous, loving care. His spirit has gone to lead the van of that long triumphant procession of heroes and martyrs of liberty, who, in all the pomp and circumstance of a militant faith, have passed through the portals of time into the light of perfect day.
Mr. Francis A. Stout made the following remarks in regard to a significant fact connected with the last hours of Mr. Lincoln. Mr. Stout said:
An incident has come to my knowledge, which at this sad time is of unusual interest.
About ten days since one of our members, General Van Alen, became even more than ever profoundly impressed with the inestimable value to the country, at this peculiar juncture of public affairs, of the life of Abraham Lincoln, the wisest and best of contemporary Americans.
Under the impulse of an uncontrollable and almost prophetic anxiety, he then wrote to the President, urging him to guard his life with greater care, that his personal security might suffer no detriment from rebel knife or bullet, and that the nation might be assured of its own safety by contemplating his.
On Friday last, the day when he was to be added to the noble army of martyrs who have died for freedom and for man, the President despatched to General Van Alen a letter of considerable length, in which, after touching upon topics of public and private concern, he stated his intention to use hereafter “due precautionary measures.” Mr. President, I can make no comment.
The resolutions were then unanimously adopted.
Mr. John H. White then arose and said that while the proceedings of the evening would be noted upon the records of the club, he deemed it eminently fit and proper that the outside world should know the horror and detestation with which the members of the club looked upon the fiendish crime which had filled the land with mourning. The assassination of the President of the United States, and the attempted assassination of the Secretary of State, in its heinousness and enormity, had no historic precedent or parallel. It stands solitary and alone, language being inadequate to give it a fitting and a proper name; and it can only be accounted for as an emanation from, and the legitimate fruit of, slavery, secession, treason, and the fiend incarnate. He did not intend to take up the time of the club by further remarks; but he hoped the mover of the resolutions which had been adopted with such unanimity would furnish copies of the same to be published with the other proceedings of the club.
After the adoption of the resolution the meeting adjourned.
Secretary.