[From the Ulster Observer, Belfast, Thursday, April 27, 1865.]
The startling and melancholy intelligence which reached our shores on yesterday is of a nature to overawe with terror and bow down with sorrow every humane and generous heart. President Lincoln has been coldly and deliberately assassinated. At the same time and the same hour his sick and suffering Secretary of State was stabbed in the bed to which illness confined him; and a double crime, unequalled in infamy and unsurpassed in atrocity, has been perpetrated at a time when consequences of fearful moment and importance are likely to throw into temporary oblivion the enormity of the guilty, deeds that have produced them.
When war was fiercely raging, and the angry passions of desperate men carried away by the whirlwind of unrestrained fury, made every hour pregnant with incalculable danger, even the terrible catastrophe which has now unexpectedly befallen the government of the United States would not then have taken the world greatly by surprise. When impiety raises its head crime rears aloft its blackened brow, and the iron does not clasp more suddenly nor cling more tenaciously to the magnet than do the patrons of a bad cause to the evil agencies by which all wickedness strives after its forlorn ends. But that such a catastrophe as has at once afflicted and disgraced the republic of America should have happened at a moment when all hearts were glad and full of joyous anticipations—at a moment when all danger was seemingly past and all enmity apparently on the decline—is a calamity as unexpected in its occurrence as it is likely to be terrible in its results. The fiery flash which shoots across the summer sky, heralding the thunder and the storm, is but a faint illustration of the sudden and terrible event which shrouds in gloom the joy and hope of a jubilant nation, and turns their hour of triumph into one of mourning and desolation. A few days ago and Europe heard with delight the intelligence that the bloody strife which for four years had been wasting the strength and energies of a noble people was drawing to a close. The civilized world regarded with admiration the magnanimity which rose, spontaneously and with the haughtiness of virtue, in the breasts of the northern people, and turned the occasion of victory into an opportunity for the display, not merely of mercy, but of brotherly sympathy and love. The feeling which welled up from the heart of the nation found a fitting recipient and fitting exponent in the breass and tongue of him who lies wrapped in a bloody shroud to-day; and there it [Page 419] no friend of liberty and humanity who will not sorrow over the fate, so sudden and so undeserved, of one who was a champion of both, and who is the latest and noblest martyr in their cause.
Abraham Lincoln has fallen at his post. The assassin’s hand may take away life, it cannot wound that which is more precious and enduring than life—the reputation which is based on tried goodness and proven greatness. In this respect the admirers of the President of the United States have nothing to regret. His life has been long enough for its purpose—his end is conducive to his fame. With more reason and more truth than their author could claim he might, on the 4th of March, (the day at first marked out by his murderers for his doom,) have used the memorable words uttered by Cæsar in the senate, and declared that he had lived long enough for his own glory and his country’s welfare. He was raised up in a season of danger to be a guide to the state in its difficulties and perils. With steady hand and unfaltering purpose he fulfilled his allotted task. Through good report and evil report; in the midst of the raging storm of battle, when all the land was convulsed and no ark of refuge appeared on the troubled waters; and at the no less dangerous crisis when the tide of victory set in, and vengeance, with glaring eye and bared arm, sought to lead the van of conquest, he was true to his duty, and true to that high mission from which his sense of duty derived its inspiration. Fearless in danger, unshaken in adversity, hopeful when the bravest all but despaired; calm amidst the wild, contagious excitement of success; as imperturbable in the general ecstacies produced by triumph as he was resolute in the general despondency produced by misfortune, he displayed, from first to last, the rare qualities of a good man and a wise ruler. His simplicity of character was mistaken for ignorance; his firmness of purpose was characterized as obstinacy; his perseverance was regarded as infatuation. Caricatured, reviled, and calumniated; sometimes hardly pressed by fortune, and sometimes hardly pressed by designing hostility, he rose, by the sheer force of his integrity and ability, above all opposition and enmity, and, in the day of final triumph, had his full share in the halo of glory which crowned the conquering arms of the republic. It was not, it is true, permitted him to see the end he would have most delighted to behold. His golden dreams of restored peace and union; of equality without reserve and justice without curtailment; of the full plenitude of righteous freedom poured out upon the land, have been extinguished in his blood; but, having watched through the night, and seen the lustre of the dawn, it may be said that he witnessed the consummation for which his soul longed. And who will say, looking to his zeal and labors, that, had he foreseen his doom, and that his life would be required for his country’s triumph, he would not have willingly bowed to destiny, and, accepting his fate, have cheerfully, and with a nunc dimittis on his lips, paid the penalty, which is no less a sacrifice because the red hand of the cowardly assassin has exacted it?
It is such thoughts as these that afford to the sympathizing mind its highest consolation under such trying circumstances. Lincoln has not fallen before the cause to which he devoted his life has been rendered secure. The victorious arms which crushed out the rebellion and drove slavery from the continent cannot be affected by the loss of one man, although he be the most important man in the state. It is the privilege of republics to be free from the perils which beset countries in which power is centred in an individual or a dynasty. The loss of the President of the United States is great, but the Constitution can repair it. A thousand daggers, successfully wielded by a thousand assassins, could not cut off the race of rulers. So long as the people exist, their ranks will supply the men necessary to conduct the administration; and in the present crisis, terrible and pressing as it is—so fraught with danger and calamity—those who have steadily watched the history of the past cannot doubt that the future will prove the stability of the institutions that have survived so [Page 420] many rude and awful shocks. Long after the present panic shall have passed away, and the peace and liberty which have been so dearly purchased shall have been consolidated on a basis too permanent for disturbance, men will look back on the last fearful act of the terrible tragedy that has drawn to a close, and see in it not a peril to the state, but the most valuable pledge of its safety. Great blessings are purchased by great sacrifices, and human suffering is the road to real glory. When President Lincoln penned the sentence which liberated forever millions of his fellow-creatures from bondage, and gave a death-blow to slavery throughout the world, he did an act which entitled him to ever-lasting fame. That act is now sealed with his blood; and the consummation, so devoutly wished and prayed for, has received its crowning sacrifice.
But what will be said of the perpetrators and instigators of this horrible deed? If the life of the President appears, as it is, a precious offering on the altar of liberty, the crime by which it was destroyed stands as a hideous blot on the hideous cause in whose behalf it was accomplished. Slavery, born of murder, has ended its days in murder. The hands that gloried in wielding the lash have found congenial delight in the pistol and the dagger. The chivalry which was brave in the scourging of defenceless men and unprotected women, has given one more proof of its valor and spirit; and the assassin who levelled his pistol at the back of an unsuspecting man, filled with kindness and pity for him and his, and the assassin who, with lying tongue and stealthy step, plied his dagger on a defenceless invalid, are worthy companions of the heroes who swept the seas in quest of unarmed vessels, pillaged a defenceless village, and shot, in cold blood, its inhabitants, and made a daring attempt to bury in the smoke and flames of their burning homes the population, young and old, of a crowded and unoffending city. It may be that the assassination of President Lincoln, and the attempted assassination of Mr. Seward, are solely attributable to the criminals directly engaged in them; but in the account which has reached us of the infamous and cowardly deeds, there is evidence of a conspiracy, in which the character of the South is seriously implicated. The murderer of the President had fixed on the 4th of March for the perpetration of his crime. His accomplice refused to act with him until he received further instructions from Richmond. This points to a deliberate plot, formed in the confederate capital, for the perpetration of the foulest crime that human wickedness could commit; and, when it is borne in mind that the St. Albans raiders and the incendiaries who sought to fire New York boasted of having obtained their commission of guilt not merely in the confederate capital, but from men high in authority in it, there is justification for the suspicion that the latest act of southern vengeance has had more than the savage ferocity of individual desperation to prompt it. If this be so, and if, on investigation, it be found that the South, beaten in the field, has had recourse to the bandit’s weapon and the assassin’s snare, an infamy greater than even slavery has brought upon her will rest upon her name forever. It is melancholy to think that even one man could be found among a people claiming the character of a brave and gallant race to perpetrate, in the name of liberty and independence, a crime which strikes at the root of all justice and humanity. But tyranny is a bad teacher of morality, and traffic in human liberty leads, by a short road, to disregard of human life. It did not need this last awful crime to reveal to the world the ferocious spirit by which but too many of the defenders of slavery are actuated. There have been, heretofore, fitful gleams of the fierce truculence which the system could not fail to foster, and an indignant world will shudder at the excesses in which it has eventuated. But it is time to draw a veil over the terrible tragedy, and from the haggard South—wasted, worn, and infuriated—crying out like the Medea of the poet’s creation, in mingled dread and resentment,
“Est-ce assez, ma vengeance, est-ce assez de deux mortes?”
[Page 421]We invite the attention of our readers to the spectacle presented by the North, where fortitude and magnanimity, constancy and hope, are still in the ascendant. Nor can we for a moment doubt that, in spite of temptation, and in defiance of example, the people who have proved so noble in suffering will not yield to provocation, and that even the dead body of their murdered chief will not rouse within them the baser passions which he would have been the first to control. It is a great trial for the people and armies of the north; but, the greater trial, the greater will be the glory of the victory, which all friends of civilization must pray may be theirs.