met me as I passed along. It was light in all the rooms, every object was familiar to me; but where were all the people who were grieving as if their hearts would break? I was puzzled and alarmed. What could be the meaning of all this? Determined to find the cause of a state of things so mysterious and so shocking, I kept on until I arrived at the east room, which I entered. There I met with a sickening surprise. Before me was a catafalque, on which rested a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments. Around it were stationed soldiers who were acting as guards; and there was a throng of people, some gazing mournfully upon the corpse, whose face was covered, others weeping pitifully. Who is dead in the White House? I demanded of one of the soldiers. The President,' was his answer; 'he was killed by an assas-, sin!' Then came a loud burst of grief from the crowd, which awoke me from my dream. I slept no more that night; and although it was only a dream, I have been strangely annoyed by it ever since." This dream continued to disturb him. A few days after, he said to Lamon: "To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there's the rub." On the evening of April 14, Good Friday, he went to the theatre. In the door of his box a hole had been cut by a body of conspirators, so that the occupants could be watched. Just after ten o'clock, John Wilkes Booth, an actor, entered the box, shot the President with a pistol in the back of the head, stabbed one of the theatre party who tried to stop him, and leaped upon the stage. In the folds of the American flag he caught his spur, and broke his leg. Limping across the stage, swinging his dagger, he cried, “Sic semper tyrannis," the motto of Virginia, and escaped, soon to be killed. The bullet, passing through the brain, left its victim unconscious, and at twenty-two minutes past seven on the following morning Abraham Lincoln was dead. CHAPTER XVII A LAST WORD VICTORY and death were needed to give Lincoln immediately his place at home and abroad. Criticism subsided and appreciation began. From that day to this the tide has flowed without an ebb. Immediately after the assassination the extreme radicals the men of more heat than judgment, of more self-appreciation than patience - were pleased, and they alone. When the President had been one day dead the committee on the conduct of the war called upon the new President, and Senator Wade said: “Johnson, we have faith in you. By the gods, there will be no trouble now in running the government!" There was trouble, however, and the country is not proud of the men who undertook to do what Lincoln was prevented from doing. The funeral was on the 19th, and behind the coffin, at the head of the line, marched a detachment of negro troops. Two days the body lay in state, while the people came to the capital to look their last on Lincoln's face. The body rests in Springfield, the town in which the President had made the beginnings of his fame. Later a monument was built there, and when it was dedicated Sherman spoke, and Grant said: "With all his disappointments from failures on the part of those to whom he had intrusted commands, and treachery on the part of those who had gained his confidence but to betray it, I never heard him utter a complaint, nor cast a censure, for bad conduct or bad faith. It was his nature to find excuses for his adversaries. In his death the nation lost its greatest hero; in his death the South lost its most just friend." Among the expressions of grief that passed over the land none was more elevated than the mourning cry of our Democracy's first poet, Walt WHITMAN: O CAPTAIN! MY CAPTAIN "O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done, 66 The ship has weathered every rack, the prize we sought is won, The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting, While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring; But O heart! heart! heart! Oh, the bleeding drops of red, Where on the deck my Captain lies, Fallen cold and dead. "O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells, Rise up for you the flag is flung - for you the bugle trills, For you bouquets and ribboned wreaths for you the shores a-crowding, For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning; Here Captain! dear father! This arm beneath your head! It is some dream that on the deck You've fallen cold and dead. "My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still, My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will, The ship is anchored safe and sound, its voyage closed and done, From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won; Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells! But I with mournful tread, Walk the deck my Captain lies, Fallen, cold and dead." To the instinctive Democracy of Whitman in the same year of Lincoln's death, was added the aristocratic Democracy of Lowell: "For him her Old World moulds aside she threw, And, choosing sweet clay from the breast Of the unexhausted West, With stuff untainted shaped a hero new, Wise, steadfast in the strength of God, and true. Once more a shepherd of mankind indeed, Who loved his charge, but never loved to lead ; But by his clear-grained human worth, They knew that outward grace is dust; They could not choose but trust In that sure-footed mind's unfaltering skill, And supple-tempered will That bent like perfect steel to spring again and thrust. |