An Oriental monarch, fearing that in the plenitude of his power he might forget the common fate, engaged a trusted attendant from time to time to remind him of his mortality.
Abraham Lincoln needed no such reminder. Before his first inauguration, and at intervals during his official life, he received frequent threatening letters, menacing him with death. These he kept in a package by themselves. Though he never permitted them to influence his action, they had their natural effect upon a mind and temperament subject to despondency, and not free from superstition. Mr. Lincoln had a strong impression that he would not live through his term of office. When, however, he was inaugurated for a second time, amid the plaudits of the nation,{278} and the clouds of civil war seemed lifting to reveal a brighter future, his spirits, too, became buoyant, and he permitted himself to believe that all would end well, and he would be permitted to reconcile the disaffected States, and bring them back into the national fold. His heart was full of tenderness and magnanimity toward the States in rebellion. His large heart was incapable of harboring malice, or thirsting for revenge.
But he was only to come in sight of the Promised Land. It was for another leader to finish his weary and protracted task, and reap where he had sown.
On the evening of the fourteenth of April, 1865, President Lincoln and wife with two friends occupied a box at Ford’s Theatre, by invitation of the manager, to witness a performance of Tom Taylor’s “American Cousin.” They arrived late, and their entrance was greeted with enthusiasm, the large audience rising to their feet and cheering.
Not long afterward, John Wilkes Booth, a young actor, who, throughout the war, had made no secret of his sympathy with the Confederate cause, entered the theatre, and, not without difficulty,{279} made his way through the crowded dress circle to the back of the box in which the President’s party were seated.
“The President has sent for me,” he said to the servant, showing his card, and thus he gained admission.
Standing in the door-way, after a hasty glance at the interior, he took a small Derringer pistol in one hand, holding at the same time a double-edged dagger in the other, he aimed deliberately at Mr. Lincoln, who sat in an arm-chair, with his back to him. There was a quick report, and the fatal bullet had entered Mr. Lincoln’s brain. Major Rathbone, the only other gentleman present in the box, quickly comprehending the truth, tried to seize the assassin, but he was too quick for him. Striking at him with his dagger, he sprang to the front of the box, leaped upon the stage, crying in a theatrical tone, “Sic semper tyrannis!” and “The South is avenged!” and, favored by his knowledge of the stage, escaped at the rear before the actors and audience, stupefied by the suddenness of his act, could arrest his flight.
Too well had the assassin done his work! The{280} President never spoke, or recovered consciousness. He was carried from the theatre to a house near at hand, where, at twenty-two minutes past seven the next morning, he expired, with his mourning friends around him.
On the same evening another tragedy came near being enacted in another part of the city—a branch, no doubt, of the same wicked conspiracy. Mr. Seward, Secretary of State, lay sick at his house, having been thrown from his carriage and severely injured a few days before. A man, who proved to be Lewis Payne Powell, gained admission by a subterfuge, and, though warned by the servant that no one was admitted to see Mr. Seward, pushed past him into the Secretary’s chamber. At the entrance the Secretary’s son, Mr. Frederick Seward, forbade him to enter, but Powell struck him upon the forehead with the butt of a pistol, and, rushing to the bed, stabbed the helpless Secretary three times, and would have killed him but for his nurse, a soldier named Robinson, who grappled with him, r............