"Duncan is in his grave;
After life's fitful fever he sleeps well;
Treason has done his worst; nor steel, nor poison,
Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing
Can touch him further."
On the Tuesday, April 11, a triumphant crowd came to the White House to greet Lincoln. He made them a speech, carefully prepared in substance rather than in form, dealing with the question of reconstruction in the South, with special reference to what was already in progress in Louisiana. The precise points of controversy that arose in this regard hardly matter now. Lincoln disclaimed any wish to insist pedantically upon any detailed plan of his; but he declared his wish equally to keep clear of any merely pedantic points of controversy with any in the South who were loyally striving to revive State Government with acceptance of the Union and without slavery; and he urged that genuine though small beginnings should be encouraged. He regretted that in Louisiana his wish for the enfranchisement of educated negroes and of negro soldiers had not been followed; but as the freedom of the negroes was unreservedly accepted, as provision was made for them in the public schools, and the new State constitution allowed the Legislature to enfranchise them, there was clear gain. "Concede that the new government of Louisiana is only to what it should be as the egg is to the fowl, we shall sooner have the fowl by hatching the egg than by smashing it. What has been said of Louisiana will apply generally to other States. So new and unprecedented," he ended, "is the whole case that no exclusive and inflexible plan can safely be prescribed as to details and collaterals. Such exclusive and inflexible plan would surely become a new entanglement. Important principles may and must be inflexible. In the present situation, as the phrase goes, it may be my duty to make some new announcement to the people of the South. I am considering, and shall not fail to act when satisfied that action will be proper." A full generation has had cause to lament that that announcement was never to be made.
On Good Friday, April 14, 1865, with solemn religious service the Union flag was hoisted again on Fort Sumter by General Anderson, its old defender. On that morning there was a Cabinet Council in Washington. Seward was absent, in bed with an injury from a carriage accident. Grant was there a little anxious to get news from Sherman. Lincoln was in a happy mood. He had earlier that morning enjoyed greatly a talk with Robert Lincoln about the young man's new experience of soldiering. He now told Grant and the Cabinet that good news was coming from Sherman. He knew it, he said, for last night he had dreamed a dream, which had come to him several times before. In this dream, whenever it came, he was sailing in a ship of a peculiar build, indescribable but always the same, and being borne on it with great speed towards a dark and undefined shore. He had always dreamed this before victory. He dreamed it before Antietam, before Murfreesborough, before Gettysburg, before Vicksburg. Grant observed bluntly that Murfreesborough had not been a victory, or of any consequence anyway. Lincoln persisted on this topic undeterred. After some lesser business they discussed the reconstruction of the South. Lincoln rejoiced that Congress had adjourned and the "disturbing element" in it could not hinder the work. Before it met again, "if we are wise and discreet we shall re-animate the States and get their governments in successful operation, with order prevailing and the Union re-established." Lastly, there was talk of the treatment of rebels and of the demand that had been heard for "persecution" and "bloody work." "No one need expect me," said Lincoln, "to take any part in hanging or killing these men, even the worst of them. Frighten them out of the country, open the gates, let down the bars, scare them off." "Shoo," he added, throwing up his large hands like a man scaring sheep. "We must extinguish our resentments if we expect harmony and union. There is too much of the desire on the part of some of our very good friends to be masters, to interfere with and dictate to those States, to treat the people not as fellow citizens; there is too little respect for their rights. I do not sympathise in these feelings." Such was the tenor of his last recorded utterance on public affairs.
In the afternoon Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln drove together and he talked to her with keen pleasure of the life they would live when the Presidency was over. That night Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln went to the theatre, for the day was not observed as in England. The Grants were to have been with them, but changed their minds and left Washington that day, so a young officer, Major Rathbone, and the lady engaged to him, both of them thereafter ill-fated, came instead. The theatre was crowded; many officers returned from the war were there and eager to see Lincoln. The play was "Our American Cousin," a play in which the part of Lord Dundreary was afterwards developed and made famous. Some time after 10 o'clock, at a point in the play which it is said no person present could afterwards remember, a shot was heard in the theatre and Abraham Lincoln fell forward upon the front of the box unconscious and dying. A wild-looking man, who had entered the box unobserved and had done his work, was seen to strike with a knife at Major Rathbone, who tried to seize him. Then he jumped from the box to the stage; he caught a spur in the drapery and fell, breaking the small bone of his leg. He rose, shouted "Sic semper tyrannis," the motto of Virginia, disappeared behind the scenes, mounted a horse that was in waiting at the stage door, and rode away.
This was John Wilkes Booth, brother of a famous actor then playing "Hamlet" in Boston. He was an actor too, and an athletic and daring youth. In him that peculiarly ferocious political passion which occasionally showed itself among Southerners was further inflamed by brandy and by that ranting mode of thought which the stage develops in some few. He was the leader of a conspiracy which aimed at compassing the deaths of others besides Lincoln. Andrew Johnson, the Vice-President, was to die. So was Seward. That same night one of the conspirators, a gigantic boy of feeble mind, gained entrance to Seward's house and wounded three people, including Seward himself, who was lying already injured in bed and received four or five wounds. Neither he nor the others died. The weak-minded or mad boy, another man, whose offense consisted in having been asked to kill Johnson and refused to do so, and another alleged conspirator, a woman, were hanged after a court-martial whose proceedings did credit neither to the new President nor to others concerned. Booth himself, after many adventures, was shot in a barn in which he stood at bay and which had been set on fire by the soldiers pursuing him. During his flight he is said to have felt much aggrieved that men did not praise him as they had praised Brutus and Cassius.
There were then in the South many broken and many permanently embittered men, indeed the temper which would be glad at Lincoln's death could be found here and there and notably among the partisans of the South in Washington. But, if it be wondered what measure of sympathy there was for Booth's dark deed, an answer lies in the fact that the murder of Lincoln would at no time have been difficult for a brave man. Fair blows were now as powerless as foul to arrest the end. On the very morning when Lincoln and Grant at the Cabinet had been telling of their hopes and fears for Sherman, Sherman himself at Raleigh in North Carolina had received and answered a letter from Johnston opening negotiations for a peaceful surrender. Three days later he was starting by rail for Greensborough when word came to him from the telegraph operator that an important message was upon the wire. He went to the telegraph box and heard it. Then he swore the telegraph operator to secrecy, for he feared that some provocation might lead to terrible disorders in Raleigh, if his army, flushed with triumph, were to learn, before his return in peace, the news that for many days after hushed their accustomed songs and shouts and cheering into a silence which was long remembered. He went off to meet Johnston and requested to be with him alone in a farmhouse near. There he told him of the murder of Lincoln. "The perspiration came out in large drops on Johnston's forehead," says Sherman, who watched him closely. He exclaimed that it was a disgrace to the age. Then he asked to know whether Sherman attributed the crime to the Confederate authorities. Sherman could assure him that no one dreamed of such a suspicion against men like him and General Lee; but he added that he was not so sure of "Jefferson Davis and men of that stripe." Then followed some delay, through a mistake of Sherman's which the authorities in Washington reversed, but in a few days all was settled and the whole of the forces under Johnston's command laid down their arms. Twenty years later, as an old man and infirm, their leader left his Southern home to be present at Sherman's funeral, where he caught a chill from which he died soon after. Jefferson Davis was captured on May 10, near the borders of Florida. He was, not without plausible grounds but quite unjustly, suspected in regard to the murder, and he suffered imprisonment for some time till President Andrew Johnson released him when the evidence against him had been seen to be worthless. He lived many years in Mississippi and wrote memoirs, in which may be found the fullest legal argument for the great Secession, his own view of his quarrels with Joseph Johnston, and much besides. Amongst other things he tells how when they heard the news of Lincoln's murder some troops cheered, but he was truly sorry for the reason that Andrew Johnson was more hostile to the cause than Lincoln. It is disappointing to think, of one who played a memorable part in history with much determination, that in this reminiscence he sized his stature as a man fairly accurately. After several other surrenders of Southern towns and small scattered forces, the Confederate General Kirby Smith, in Texas, surrendered to General Canby, Banks' successor, on May 26, and after four years and forty-four days armed resistance to the Union was at an end.
On the night of Good Friday, Abraham Lincoln had been carried still unconscious to a house near the theatre. His sons and other friends were summoned. He never regained consciousness. "A look of unspeakable peace," say his secretaries who were there, "came over his worn features." At 7.22 on the morning of April 15, Stanton, watching him more closely than the rest, told them what had passed in the words, "Now he belongs to the ages."
The mourning of a nation, voiced to later times by some of the best lines of more than one of its poets, and deeper and more prevailing for the lack of comprehension which some had shown him before, followed his body in its slow progress—stopping at Baltimore, where once his life had been threatened, for the homage of vast crowds; stopping at New York, where among the huge assembly old General Scott came to bid him affectionate farewell; stopping at other cities for the tribute of reverent multitudes—to Springfield, his home of so many years, where, on May 4, 1865, it was laid to rest. After the burial service the "Second Inaugural" was read over his grave, nor could better words than his own have been chosen to honour one who "with malice toward none, with charity toward all, with firmness in the right as God gave him to see the right, had striven on to finish the work that he was in." In England, apart from more formal tokens of a late-learnt regard and an unfeigned regret, Punch embodied in verse of rare felicity the manly contrition of its editor for ignorant derision in past years; and Queen Victoria symbolised best of all, and most acceptably to Americans, the feeling of her people when she wrote to Mrs. Lincoln "as a widow to a widow." Nor, though the transactions in which he bore his part were but little understood in this country till they were half forgotten, has tradition ever failed to give him, by just instinct, his rank with the greatest of our race.
Many great deeds had been done in the war. The greatest was the keeping of the North together in an enterprise so arduous, and an enterprise for objects so confusedly related as the Union and freedom. Abraham Lincoln did this; nobody else could have done it; to do it he bore on his sole shoulders such a weight of care and pain as few other men have borne. When it was over it seemed to the people that he had all along been thinking their real thoughts for them; but they knew that this was because he had fearlessly thought for himself. He had been able to save the nation, partly because he saw that unity was not to be sought by the way of base concession. He had been able to free the slaves, partly because he would not hasten to this object at the sacrifice of what he thought a larger purpose. This most unrelenting enemy to the project of the Confederacy was the one man who had quite purged his heart and mind from hatred or even anger towards his fellow-countrymen of the South. That fact came to be seen in the South too, and generations in America are likely to remember it when all other features of his statecraft have grown indistinct. A thousand reminiscences ludicrous or pathetic, passing into myth but enshrining hard fact, will prove to them that this great feature of his policy was a matter of more than policy. They will remember it as adding a peculiar lustre to the renovation of their national existence; as no small part of the glory, surpassing that of former wars, which has become the common heritage of North and South. For perhaps not many conquerors, and certainly few successful statesmen, have escaped the tendency of power to harden or at least to narrow their human sympathies; but in this man a natural wealth of tender compassion became richer and more tender while in the stress of deadly conflict he developed an astounding strength.
Beyond his own country some of us recall his name as the greatest among those associated with the cause of popular government. He would have liked this tribute, and the element of truth in it is plain enough, yet it demands one final consideration. He accepted the institutions to which he was born, and he enjoyed them. His own intense experience of the weakness of democracy did not sour him, nor would any similar experience of later times have been likely to do so. Yet if he reflected much on forms of government it was with a dominant interest in something beyond them. For he was a citizen of that far country where there is neither aristocrat nor democrat. No political theory stands out from his words or actions; but they show a most unusual sense of the possible dignity of common men and common things. His humour rioted in comparisons between potent personages and Jim Jett's brother or old Judge Brown's drunken coachman, for the reason for which the rarely jesting Wordsworth found a hero in the "Leech-Gatherer" or in Nelson and a villain in Napoleon or in Peter Bell. He could use and respect and pardon and overrule his far more accomplished ministers because he stood up to them with no more fear or cringing, with no more dislike or envy or disrespect than he had felt when he stood up long before to Jack Armstrong. He faced the difficulties and terrors of his high office with that same mind with which he had paid his way as a poor man or navigated a boat in rapids or in floods. If he had a theory of democracy it was contained in this condensed note which he wrote, perhaps as an autograph, a year or two before his Presidency: "As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.—A. LINCOLN."