Who—were circumstantial evidence strong and conclusive, such as only time and the slow-weaving fates could elucidate and deny—who will believe, when the mists of uncertainty which cloud the present shall have dissolved, that a woman born and bred in respectability and competence—a Christian mother, and a citizen who never offended the laws of civil propriety; whose unfailing attention to the most sacred duties of life has won for her the name of "a proper Christian matron"; whose heart was ever warmed by charity; whose door unbarred to the poor; and whose Penates had never cause to veil their faces—who will believe that she could so suddenly and so fully have learned the intricate arts of sin? A daughter of the South, her life associations confirming her natal predilections, her individual preferences inclined, without logic or question, to the Southern people, but with no consciousness nor intent of disloyalty to her government, and causing no exclusion from her friendship and active favors of the people of the loyal North, nor repugnance in the distribution among our Union soldiery of all needed comforts, and on all occasions.
A strong but guileless-hearted woman, her maternal solicitude would have been the first denouncer, even the abrupt betrayer of a plotted crime in which one companion of her son could have been implicated, had cognizance of such reached her. Her days would have been agonized, and her nights sleepless, till she might have exposed and counteracted that spirit of defiant hate which watched its moment of vantage to wreak an immortal wrong—till she might have sought the intercession and absolution of the Church, her refuge, in behalf of those she loved. The brains which were bold and crafty and couchant enough to dare the world's opprobrium in the conception of a scheme which held as naught the lives of men in highest places, would never have imparted it to the intelligence, nor sought the aid nor sympathy, of any living woman who had not, like Lady Macbeth, "unsexed herself"—not though she were wise and discreet as Maria Theresa or the Castilian Isabella. This woman knew it not. This woman, who, on the morning preceding that blackest day in our country's annals, knelt in the performance of her most sincere and sacred duty at the confessional, and received the mystic rite of the Eucharist, knew it not. Not only would she have rejected it with horror, but such a proposition, presented by the guest who had sat at her hearth as the friend and convive of the son upon whose arm and integrity her widowed womanhood relied for solace and protection, would have roused her maternal wits to some sure cunning which would have contravened the crime and sheltered her son from the evil influences and miserable results of such companionship.
The mothers of Charles IX. and of Nero could harbor underneath their terrible smiles schemes for the violent and unshriven deaths, or the moral vitiation and decadence which would painfully and gradually remove lives sprung from their own, were they obstacles to their demoniac ambition. But they wrought their awful romances of crime in lands where the sun of supreme civilization, through a gorgeous evening of Sybaritic luxury, was sinking, with red tints of revolution, into the night of anarchy and national caducity. In our own young nation, strong in its morality, energy, freedom, and simplicity, assassination can never be indigenous. Even among the desperadoes and imported lazzaroni of our largest cities, it is comparatively an infrequent cause of fear.
The daughters of women to whom, in their yet preserved abodes, the noble mothers who adorned the days of our early independence are vividly remembered realities and not haunting shades—the descendants of earnest seekers for liberty, civil and religious, of rare races, grown great in heroic endurance, in purity which comes of trial borne, and in hope born of conscious right, whom the wheels of fortune sent hither to transmit such virtues—the descendants of these have no heart, no ear for the diabolisms born in hotbeds of tyranny and intolerance. No descendant of these—no woman of this temperate land—could have seen, much less joined, her son, descending the sanguinary and irrepassable ways of treason and murder to an ignominious death, or an expatriated and attainted life, worse than the punishing wheel and bloody pool of the poets' hell.
In our country, where reason and moderation so easily quench the fires of insane hate, and where the vendetta is so easily overcome by the sublime grace of forgiveness, no woman could have been found so desperate as to sacrifice all spiritual, temporal, and social good, self, offspring, fame, honor, and all the desiderata of life, and time, and immortality, to the commission, or even countenance, of such a deed of horror, as we have been compelled to contemplate during the two months past.
In a Christian land, where all records and results of the world's intellectual, civil, and moral advancement mold the human heart and mind to highest impulses, the theory of old Helvetius is more probable than desirable.
The natures of all born in equal station are not so widely varied as to present extremes of vice and goodness, but by the effects of rarest and severest experience. Beautiful fairies and terrible gnomes do not stand by each infant's cradle, sowing the nascent mind with tenderest graces or vilest errors. The slow attrition of vicious associations and law-defying indulgences, or the sudden impetus of some terribly multiplied and social disaster, must have worn away the susceptibility of conscience and self-respect, or dashed the mind from the height of these down to the depths of despair and recklessness, before one of ordinary life could take counsel with violence and crime. In no such manner was the life of our client marked. It was the parallel of nearly all the competent masses. Surrounded by the scenes of her earliest recollections, independent in her condition she was satisfied with the mundus of her daily pursuits, and the maintenance of her own and children's status in society and her Church.
Remember your wives, mothers, sisters, and gentle friends whose graces, purity, and careful affection, ornament and cherish and strengthen your lives. Not widely different from their natures and spheres have been the nature and sphere of the woman who sits in the prisoner's dock to-day, mourning with the heart of Alcestis her children and her lot; by whose desolated hearthstone a solitary daughter wastes her uncomforted life away in tears and prayers and vigils for the dawn of hope; and this wretchedness and unpitied despair have closed like a shadow around one of earth's common pictures of domestic peace and social comfort, destroyed by the one sole cause—suspicion fastened and fed upon the facts of acquaintance and mere fortuitous intercourse with that man in whose name so many miseries gather, the assassin of the President.
Since the days when Christian teachings first elevated woman to her present free, refined, and refining position, man's power and honoring regard have been the palladium of her sex.
Let no stain of injustice, eager for a sacrifice to revenge, rest upon the reputation of the men of our country and time!