His body was thrust somewhere into the earth he had disgraced or else was flung, weighted with stones, into the river, all the flood tides of which could not wash away the black guilt of him. No man knows where the body of Wilkes Booth was buried.
"The king is dead! Long live the king!"
When Tom rode sadly up Pennsylvania Avenue, with a crape-laden flag at half-mast over the Capitol, glad for the stern justice that had been dealt out to the murderer he loathed, but bowed down with grief for the murdered President he had loved, Abraham Lincoln was no longer President of the United States. In his stead, our uncrowned king was Andrew Johnson, of Tennessee, a Southern Unionist who had been elected Vice President when the people chose Lincoln a second time for their ruler. Johnson had been born to grinding poverty in a rough community where "skule-l'arnin'" was not to be had. He was a grown man, earning a scanty livelihood as a village tailor, when his wife taught him to read and write. He worked his hard way up in life, became a man of prominence in his village, in his county, in his State, until he was chosen for Lincoln's running-mate as a representative Southern Unionist. He was of course a man of native force, but he sometimes drowned his mind in liquor. That fatal habit pulled him down. He was a failure as a President, though thereafter he served his State and his country well as a United States Senator from Tennessee.
The White House was changed under its new ruler. John Hay, full of cheer and wit, was abroad as a secretary of legation. Nicolay, his superior officer, was a consul in Europe. The Lincoln family had gone West through a sorrowing country, bearing the body of the martyr-President to its burial-place in Springfield, Illinois. For a while some familiar faces were left. At first, the same Cabinet ministers served the new President. For some time, Uncle Moses had to learn no new names as he carried about the summons to the Cabinet meetings. But the visitors to the White House had changed mightily. Rough men from Tennessee and the other Border States, some of them diamonds in the rough, swarmed there. Lincoln had never used tobacco. The new-comers both smoked and chewed. Clouds of smoke filled the lower story and giant spittoons lined the corridors and invaded the public rooms. Gradually the Republican leaders ceased to wait upon the President.
Among the people who left the White House soon after Lincoln left it was Tom Strong. On a bright May morning he walked across the portico, where Towser was eagerly awaiting him and where Uncle Moses followed him. Unk' Mose lifted his withered black hands and called down blessings on the boy who had been his angel of freedom and had led him out of bondage.
"De good Lawd bress you, Mas'r Tom. And de good Lawd bress dat dar wufless ol' houn' dawg Towser, too. 'Kase Towser, he lubs you, Mas'r Tom,—and so duz I," Uncle Moses shyly added.
The venerable old negro and the white boy shook hands in a long farewell upon the steps of the White House. Then Tom turned away from the historic roof that had so long sheltered him and walked to the railroad station, to take the train for New York. Towser trotted stiffly by his side, trying at every step to lick his master's hand.
Tom Strong studied hard at home and then went to Yale, as his father had done before him.