Louvel was tried before the Chamber of Peers. He pleaded guilty. He denied having any accomplices. He had conferred with nobody. He recognized the dagger as his own; he gave his hatred and abhorrence of the Bourbon family as his only motive for the crime. He was convicted unanimously. He expressed no regret for what he had done, and died with stoical indifference. He was guillotined June 7, 1820.
CHAPTER XXII
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
CHAPTER XXII
ASSASSINATION OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN
(April 14, 1865)
IN the annals of this nation no tragedy more pathetic has been recorded than the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States.
The Civil War which had divided the country into two hostile camps for four years and had laid waste the Southern States of the Union—or the Confederate States of America, to designate them by the name they adopted—was at an end. General Lee had surrendered the army of Virginia, the flower of the Confederate fighting forces, to General Grant at Appomattox Court House, and while General Johnston’s army in North Carolina, and a few separate minor corps, still remained in the field, Lee’s surrender was generally construed as the termination of the long and cruel war, and joy ruled supreme throughout the North. Liberty had triumphed, and four million slaves had been emancipated!
The surrender of Lee took place on the eighth of April, 1865. On the following day President Lincoln visited the late capital of the Confederacy. He traversed the city in all directions, and everywhere he manifested the kindest disposition towards the South, and expressed the wish that all traces of the unfortunate war should disappear as soon as possible and that cordial relations between the two sections of the country should be reëstablished at once. Very likely there was not a man in all the Northern States happier at the prospect of a lasting peace than Abraham Lincoln. His great and noble heart, sensitive as a woman’s, had been bleeding for years at the sight of the gigantic fratricidal war, of which Providence had made him the most conspicuous figure. But five weeks before, he had entered upon his second presidential term, and in his inaugural address he had foreshadowed the policy of leniency and moderation which he intended to show to the “rebels” in case of the final victory of the Union armies. That address revealed the true inwardness of the great man; it was spoken with an eloquence peculiarly his own; it was full of thought, sweetness, firmness, unswerving fidelity to duty, high morality made more impressive even by the simplicity and originality of language. At the same time it breathed a tenderness for the vanquished which made it almost an olive-branch tendered to those who were still in arms against the government and inviting them to return to the hearthstones of the nation of which they had been the favored sons and daughters for nearly a century. Although the triumph of the Union and its armies was already in sight as an event of the near future, nothing in that address indicated boastfulness and supercilious pride. No arrogance, no pompous reference to the superiority of the North in heroism or exploits! On the contrary, the President humbles himself before the decrees of the Almighty, he confesses the great national crime and the justice of the immense punishment.