The financial statement of the year was preceded by motions in the House of Commons, for the purpose of obtaining a Parliamentary pledge for the remission of certain duties, which were considered a blot on the fiscal system. One was the Malt Tax, for the repeal or modification of which a desultory agitation had been promoted by the Tories for some years in the agricultural districts. The other motion was in favour of a further reduction of the duties on Fire Insurance. Though the Anti-Malt Tax agitators were beaten, the opponents of the Fire Insurance duties prevailed against the Government. The public had been informed by the Royal Speech that the receipts of the revenue had come up to the estimates; but this information rather understated the fact. The prosperity of the finances, in truth, had exceeded the most sanguine calculations of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Remissions of taxation were consequently looked for, and speculation was busy with conjectures as to the quarter in which reductions would be proposed. The 27th of April was appointed for the financial statement, and on that day Mr. Gladstone presented his accounts and his plans. He had raised a larger revenue than had ever been raised in England by taxation at any period, whether of peace or war. In 1864-65 the actual expenditure had been £66,462,000, being £611,000 less than the estimate. Comparing the expenditure of the year with the revenue, he found that there was an apparent surplus of £3,231,000. The estimated revenue had been £66,128,000, whereas the actual revenue was £70,313,000. It had been expected that there would be a total loss on the year of £3,080,000, whereas there had been altogether a gain of £147,000. This showed how the prosperity of the country was advancing by leaps and bounds. Coming to the estimate of the income and expenditure of the ensuing year, Mr. Gladstone said he had to provide for an expenditure of £66,139,000, while he estimated the revenue at £70,170,000. This showed, on the basis of existing taxation, a surplus of £4,031,000. That surplus, he stated, he would dispose of as follows:—He proposed to equalise the stamp duty on scrip certificates and receipts in the case of English and Foreign transactions. The stamp on agreements for letting houses would be reduced to a penny. The tax on appraisements would be graduated, so that property amounting to £5 would not pay 2s. 6d. but
GENERAL ROBERT LEE.
3d., and so on upwards. The stamp duty on charter parties would be reduced to 6d. There were also to be alterations in regard to Marine Insurance stamps, and stamps on insurances against accidental death, personal injury, and damages to plate-glass. He refused to reduce the Malt Tax, but he proposed to lower the Tea Duty by a remission of 6d. per lb. As to the Income Tax, he admitted that Ministers should do all they could for its reduction. It was, at present, at the lowest point, practically, at which it ever stood. It had never been lower than 6d. in the pound, but still he proposed to remove one-third of it, thus reducing it to 4d. The final loss to the Exchequer by this reduction of 2d. would be £2,600,000, of which about £1,650,000 would fall upon the current year. Dealing with the Fire Insurance duty, he pointed out that it was desirable it should be reduced to a uniform rate of 1s. 6d., and to this would be added the substitution of a penny stamp in lieu of the 1s. duty on insurance policies. The relief given by the proposed reductions would be:—On tea, £2,300,000, on Income Tax, £2,600,000, and on Fire Insurance Duty, £520,000, making a total of £5,420,000, of which £3,778,000 would fall on this year. Deducting this latter sum from the estimated surplus, £4,031,000, there would be still a surplus of £253,000 on the accounts of the coming year.
It was on the 2nd of June that Lord Russell in the House of Lords declared the Civil War in America at an end, and refused Confederate vessels any further rights of harbour in English ports. It has been shown how General Sherman’s devastating march through Georgia exposed the real weakness of the South. At the end of 1864 Hood’s army was pining away in Alabama or Tennessee, and Beauregard, with 20,000 men, alone stood between Sherman’s legions, flushed with victory, and the harassed and outnumbered army of Lee. On Christmas Day the Confederates repelled an attack by Butler on Wilmington, but on the 14th of January, 1865, when operations were renewed by General Terry and Admiral Porter, the key of the position was easily taken, and the Confederates were deprived of their only free and practicable outlet to the sea. On the 17th of February Charleston was evacuated. Sherman had already set forth on his march to the north—Beauregard retreating rapidly before him. And yet, though they thus had victory within their grasp, the leaders of the North made one last effort to conciliate the South. “Although no authorised version of the negotiations has ever been given to the public,” says Mr. Sterne, “it was conceded that, with the single exception of slavery and submission to the authority of the Union on the part of the South, every condition that the Southern States could ask would be submitted to by the North, including the adoption of the Southern debt and the reimbursement to the Southern slave-holders for slaves lost.”[230] In a moment of insanity the Southern Government rejected these generous terms, and so the war went on. Sherman’s movement to the north enabled Grant to press Lee with effect. He forced him back to Petersburg and Richmond. On the 1st of April both towns were captured, and Lee was not only pursued but overtaken and beaten in his last fight. “General,” wrote Grant to his fallen foe on the 7th of April, “the result of the last week must convince you of the hopelessness of further resistance on the part of the army of Northern Virginia in this struggle. I feel that it is so, and regard it as my duty to shift from myself the responsibility of any further effusion of blood, by asking of you the surrender of that portion of the Confederate States Army known as the Army of Northern Virginia.” The capitulation was arranged on terms which were extremely generous to the vanquished. No prisoners were taken. The officers were paroled, and the troops were all permitted to return home on condition of submitting to the Federal Government. Within a few days Johnston surrendered to Sherman on the same terms, and on the 18th of April the war was at an end.
The victors astonished the world by their moderation. Not a single rebel, save the governor of a military prison, who was convicted of behaving with revolting brutality to Federal prisoners in the South, perished on the scaffold. Even the few prominent civilians who were arrested and imprisoned were soon released. The best men, both in the Northern and Southern States, vied with each other in promoting a policy based on conciliation for the future and oblivion for the past. Mr. Lincoln, who had been re-elected President in the autumn of 1864, began his second term of office on the 4th of March, 1865. On the evening of the 14th of April he visited Ford’s Theatre at Washington with Mrs. Lincoln and another lady and gentleman, and about half-past ten, during a pause in the performance, he was shot by one Wilkes Booth, who suddenly entered the President’s box and discharged a pistol at his head. Booth then leaped on the stage flourishing a dagger, and exclaiming “Sic semper tyrannis!” escaped from the theatre. Mr. Lincoln never recovered consciousness, and he died on the morning of the 15th.
From every part of the world expressions of sympathy were conveyed to Mrs. Lincoln and the American people, who had been thus cruelly deprived of the sagacious and upright statesman whose civic courage and unquenchable patriotism had saved the Union. The Queen, who had always admired Mr. Lincoln’s character and career, sent an autograph letter to Mrs. Lincoln, expressing, with simple and womanly tenderness, her sympathy for the President’s family.[231] Addresses on the assassination of the President were presented by both Houses of Parliament to the Crown, and the Queen in reply to these wrote: “I entirely participate in the sentiments you have expressed in your address to me on the subject of the assassination of the President of the United States. I have given directions to my Minister at Washington to make known to the Government of that country the feelings which you entertain in common with myself and my whole people with regard to this deplorable event.” The miscreants who had conspired against Lincoln’s life had also intended to assassinate his chief Ministers, and one of them inflicted severe wounds on Mr. Seward and his son, from which, however, they both recovered.
Mr. Lincoln was succeeded by the Vice-President, Mr. Andrew Johnson, who, in the first moments of excitement which followed Lincoln’s murder, charged Mr. Jefferson Davis and the leaders of the South, with being Booth’s accomplices. These charges, however, were not generally credited, because it was clear that the life of Lincoln, whose policy was notoriously one of clemency and moderation, was quite as precious to the conquered States, as to their conquerors. But undoubtedly the angry passions which Booth’s crime had stimulated, increased the difficulty of reorganising the territory now held by the Federal troops. To admit the Southern States to the Union with their old rights of sovereignty and autonomy as if nothing had happened was impossible. The negroes, though free, were unenfranchised, and therefore at the mercy of their old masters. But the negroes had bled and suffered for the Union during the war, and they could not be abandoned now. Moreover, Lincoln’s proclamation abolishing slavery gave them an implied promise of protection from subsequent oppression. But then the American Constitution contained no provision for dealing with the difficulty which the war had created. To enfranchise with a stroke of the pen a vast ignorant servile population, which had been demoralised by slavery, was fraught with the utmost peril, not only to American democracy, but to American civilisation. Again, the States themselves had always determined the conditions of enfranchisement. As sovereign communities they had the clearest right to organise their own internal administration free from all interference from the Federal authorities, who had no power over them, save that of seeing that they adopted a republican form of government. The first step taken was to organise the Freedman’s Bureau with agents all over the South with the object of protecting the negroes from injustice and oppression. But President Johnson had spent his life in the Slave State of Tennessee, and he had many sympathies with the slave-owners. Taking his stand on the letter of the Constitution, he refused to sanction those methods of reconstruction which Congress adopted, and sent military governors to rule the conquered States, until their permanent government was organised. The fourteenth amendment to the Constitution prohibiting slavery in the United States was carried in June. But the President vetoed the Freedman’s Bureau Bill and the Civil Rights Bill, his veto being overridden by the majority in Congress, in which, however, the Southern States were not yet represented. In a word, the President was soon in open conflict with the Republican majority that had carried the country through the long and bloody war.