trace backward our past steps, to discover any further proofs of his closeness to us, and of his interest in our concerns. Is the Mighty and the Just One, any longer, near to us, midst bereavement and disaster, and crimes that unite such cruelty and treachery to such seeming impunity?

A chief magistrate, chosen to his high post in most difficult times a man of the people, in his training, and tastes, and habits, and utterances, but simple, massive, sincere, kindly and patient, had filled his first term of four years. And now, but in the second month of his second term of four years, he is congratulating us on the apparent success of the gigantic conflict, in which he and we had embarked for the vindication of the national unity and life. Four years since had the flag of the Union been lowered at Fort Sumter in South Carolina, as the attempted revolution began its treacherous outbreak. On the very anniversary which completed four years of time from the descent of that flag adown the staff whence it had long floated, the noble officer who had been compelled to surrender the post is instructed to raise it again on the ruinous mound. He has probably done it on that fortress of our southern coast. But, unknown to him and to his associates who have been thus heralding the failure of Treason, bearded in its own den, and the return of Authority and Nationality to these their rightful outposts—that president, under whose orders they act, is, at the very centre and seat of the national government, himself smitten down. It is not in Richmond, the surrendered capital of the baffled revolt, that this occurs; but in Washington, where, for four years of what had almost seemed a garrison life, he had been each month of the preceding

term in greater apparent danger of such assault than now. And this, too, when in a recent visit to that recovered city of Richmond, this eminent victim had shown such disposition to welcome the return of the worsted and baffled insurgents, by a gentleness and magnanimity which four years of contumelious obloquy had not soured, and with a parental indulgence that many of his staunchest supporters blamed

as extreme.

Shrewd, apt, penetrating, and yet familiar, honest and firm, he had established himself—against strongest disadvantages-in the popular heart, and in the esteem of the friends of freedom in the Old World. He was widely hailed as akin to our first President Washington in the simplicity, breadth, disinterestedness and integrity of his character; called of Providence, as he seemed to be, to become the Restorer over a wider territory and against a fiercer foe, where Washington had been the Founder. He fell, not by an open, manful attack, but under a shot fired without warning, from behind: not, in a collision waged upon equal terms, but by an assault marked with a ferocious disregard of all equality of risks, he is dispatched unawares. And the murderer mouths, with a flourish of his dagger, "Such be evermore the tyrant's fate," a motto borrowed from the escutcheon of Virginia, and, upon that State's shield, surrounding a presentiment of David with the head of Goliath. It was as if the cowardly stabber would plant himself, in his frenzied avenging of the cause of oppression, on the glorious plane of David, the fearless champion of Israel's freedom, and of Israel's God; and would fain make his victim a huge, lawless, godless Gittite, who had invaded a country not his own: while actually that murdered magistrate was but

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 time at 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 effectual 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 crimebecome, 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 as 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