LINCOLN'S ASSASSINATION
When the news of the assassination of Lincoln, which occurred on the night of the 14th of April, 1865, reached Fort Delaware the next morning, there was great excitement among the Yankee guards and prisoners also. The Yankee soldiers looked mad and vindictive, and the guards were doubled. Visions of retaliatory measures—banishment to Dry Tortugas, or worse—rose up before the Confederate officers. If retaliation was resorted to, no one knew how many Southern lives it would take to appease the wrath and vengeance of the North. If lots were cast for the victims, no one knew who would draw the black ballots. While all were discussing these questions in all seriousness, Peter Akers, the wit of the prison, broke the tension with the remark, "It was hard on old Abe to go through the war and then get bushwhacked in a theater."
The Yankees almost moved heaven and earth to implicate the Confederate authorities in the assassination of Lincoln, but failed most signally. No doubt, they would have given worlds, if at their command, if President Jeff Davis and other leaders could have been connected with the plot and crime. As is well known, Boothe, the assassin, was shot dead in the attempt to capture him, and that a man named Harold, who was with Boothe when killed: Payne, who the same night attempted to assassinate Secretary of State, Wm. H. Seward, and Mrs. Surratt—were hung, the latter in all probability innocent of any crime; there was no evidence to connect her with the assassination or the plot. Some of the assassins boarded at her house and her son fled.
The assassination of Lincoln was the act of a scatter-brained actor, John Wilkes Boothe, and did the South no good, if, indeed, it was so intended. Many people think that if Lincoln had lived the South would have fared much better after the war. I do not think so. Lincoln might have been disposed to have dealt more justly with the South, but in my opinion he would have been overruled by the Sewards, the Stantons, the Mortons, the Garrisons, and the Thad Stevenses, and many more of that ilk, who lived and died inveterate haters and vilifiers of the Southern people. Meanness is bred in the bone of some people. If Lincoln ever did a kindly or generous act in behalf of the South, I do not recall it.
When Gen. Joseph E. Johnston surrendered on the 26th day of April, 1865, the last vestige of hope against hope vanished. We felt like saying, "'Tis the last libation that Liberty draws from the heart that bleeds and breaks in her cause."