asserting, as his official oath bound him to assert it, the whole nation's right, as banded freemen, to the whole of that nation's territory.

On that same night and at the same hour a Confederate assassin attacks the Secretary of State, when confined to his couch by a fracture of both the arm and the jaw, and under the vile falsehood of a friendly, not only, but of a medical errand, with a brazen fraud that recalls the Joab or the Judas, simulating friendship, when contriving murder, he attempts, himself, the young, vigorous, and sinewy, to sever the throat of this aged, disabled, and bed-ridden, and helpless object of his malignity. Frantically he stabbed and bludgeoned, not the parent only, but the sons and attendants of his intended quarry, and all on the same chivalrous pretext of exterminating tyranny; as if there could be a tyranny viler than that which, in the cause of oppression, resorted to methods so mendacious and remorseless.

Was the God of justice indifferent, that he permitted the butchery of a kindly, generous, patriotic, and upright ruler; and that he allowed what may possibly, if not probably be the attendant slaughter of others, whose only fault was that they were that ruler's faithful and chosen counselors, or were but the inmates of the household of that foremost statesman in the cabinet of that massacred chief? While stealthy and craven murder, with bludgeon and knife and pistol, thus raged, and thus-for the timeat least-escaped, did the Justice on high slumber, or connive, or sanction? It neither sanctioned deed so foul, nor connived at ferocity so base, nor slumbered for one moment, *Apprehensions since, in God's mercy, disappointed.

through all the slow concoction, and all the swift achievement of the plot.

But if God as it may well be-saw that-much as the nation had already learned, in the few later months of the struggle, to know of the inherent evils, and of the ineradicable barbarism of Slavery-it yet needed, by a more malign outbreak, and a more distinguished sacrifice, to have its holy wrath aroused and intensified into a deadly and uncompromising decision against all further tolerance of the system then might not this very hiding of himself, as the Immediate Avenger-this abstinence from intervening to ward off the attack-this delay to entangle the assailants by an immediate pursuit, and a prompt punishment on the part of the by-standers-prove him in the end and at the more fitting season, the fuller and the more ef fectual Vindicator of the rights and lives thus hacked at? Might not the Judge of all the earth-thus for the time withdrawn, and vailing his cognizance of the huge crime— become, by such apparent withdrawal and delay to interpose, only the more signally, and the more surely, the Just Extirpator of the usages of a social system, which made for centuries the slave so mute a victim, and the slave-master so relentless and brutal a foeman? In a document, which was his own last message, Abraham Lincoln had spoken of God's possible purpose to compensate each drop of blood drawn by the driver's lash, by another drop of blood streaming from the soldier's sword. Might not the All-Wise God emphasize and rubricate that message, so to speak, by allowing the dying spasms of the tyranny which wielded that driver's lash, to dash, as it were, upon the face of this prophetic admonition, the blood of its

utterer; and thus leave it, for all after-time of our national history, slavery's bloody hand set at its own clumsy seal, slavery's crimson endorsement of its own indictment? Might not the very champions of the institution become thus God's select and appointed expositors of its true hideousness, and his unconscious executioners of their own idol, whilst they deemed themselves its heroic avengers? They had been wont to speak with profuse, unstinted eulogy, of the slaveholder's relations to his bondmen ast rearing a nobler civilization, and nursing a rare and true chivalry, like that of the old Paladins and Bayards. In a school book prepared in Britain for the use of their own Southern youth, they had spoken of Southern society as lacking but titles to make it the peer and welcome mate of the nobler classes of Europe. When this chivalry, thus disdainful of Northern industry, had been left, as at Andersonville and Belle Isle to famish and dismember and craze its prisoners; to butcher, as at Fort Pillow, its surrendered, disarmed, and unresisting prisoners because of their dusky skin; to plan the burning of Northern hotels, with their unarmed inmates, non-combatants, and many of them helpless women and children; to offer in their own public journals large moneyed rewards for the heads of their Northern opposers, as if the Dayak and the New Zealander were the crowning types of their vaunted chivalry; and to carve into finger-rings the bones of their Northern foemen fallen in battle; and then, to inaugurate private assassination as the supplement of failure in open war, was not the system, so employing its lease of domination, and so carrying out its demonstrations of vaunted superiority in knightly valor, and honor, and

refinement, and courtesy, left virtually in the avenging wisdom of God, to fill up before the nations of the earth, the measure of its own dishonor and their loathing? The cry of the assailant, as he brandished the knife, "Such be evermore the tyrant's fate," was not, as he intended it, the verdict of conscience and history against the murdered, but the assassin's self-recited verdict of that conscience and that history, and of the God who implanted the one and who shapes the other, against the murderers, and against the yet more tyrannous system that bred them. "To perish in their own corruption," is the fearful doom of Scripture against sinners—a rotting away in the leprous sloughing of their own vices. And the embodied Tyranny that, defiant, elate, and vaunting, wrote itself thus bloody, thus ruthless, and thus false, and then seemed to look round, assured of sympathy and applause, was in fact, but building its own gibbet by the feat, and writing in red letters its own death-sentence for the amazement of a gazing and loathing Universe; at the very same time, and in the very act, by which it supposed itself the rival of old Roman heroism and of old Hebrew devotedness, treading in the steps, as it thought, of Brutus and of David. In the mysteries of the Divine government, it is needed that a certain range and swoop be given for "sin" to show, in the affecting and inimitable language of Scripture, its own "exceeding sinfulness." And God may have given to rebellion and slavebreeding their long tether of domination and their high, broad stage of glorying, and this new glut of eminent victims, only in the just intent that thus they might earn a wider execration, and go down amid a more unanimous tempest of denunciation and abhorrence; the shriek of

their own frenzied triumph, but, in another and juster sense of it, the world's indignant acclaim over the tyranny that dealt so craven a blow, and contrived so dastardly and ferocious a treachery.

God, again, removes his own useful and honored instruments, at dates that to us seem untimely, and in modes, that, although painful and even shocking to themselves and to the survivors and friends who mourn them, yet do, in reality, round the course of the departed as into a more epic symmetry, and crown the hero's or statesman's career of enfranchisement and victory, as with something that resembles the palm of religious martyrdom. The successful policy, and the triumphant campaign might secure to him who had ordered the one or the other, a niche of honor in the nation's gallery of her chief worthies, who had deserved well of the Republic. An earlier assassination of this chosen ruler had been menaced and probably intended at Baltimore, when he was first going to be inducted into office. It was, in God's good providence, an utter failure. How much, in the interval between the two terms of the first, frustrated attempt, and the final consummation of the second attempt, had God permitted this chief of our people to witness and to accomplish? And all the intervening denunciation by frenzied opposers and now at last the bullet of fanatical hate, have served finally to give to the character thus developed, and the career thus suddenly shut, a yet loftier niche in the nation's grateful memory. It has now become shelved, apart from predecessors and it may be trusted, from successors also— the name and fame of a vast revolt successfully quelledof a great social reform, that seemed to require centuries,