Mrs. Mary E. Surratt were sentenced to be hanged. Edward Spangler, Michael O'Laughlin, Doctor Samuel T. Mudd and Samuel Arnold were imprisoned. All the prisoners except O'Laughlin, who died in the military prison on the dry Tortugas, an island off the coast of Florida, were pardoned by Andrew Johnson. The first to whom a pardon was issued was Doctor Mudd, who was held to be an accessory after the fact, as he set Booth's leg, and thereby assisted in his escape. Sympathy for him seemed to be justified by his character and his professional sense of duty. The greatest interest, however, was in the case of Mrs. Surratt. Her house in Washington had been a meeting-place of the conspirators, and had long been a harbor for enemies of the republic. Evidence was introduced to show that she had actual knowledge of the plot to murder Lincoln. Strenuous effort was made on her behalf, but she was condemned to die, and appeals addressed both to Stanton and to Johnson did not avail to secure her release. She was hanged with Payne, Herold and Atzerot on Friday, July seventh.

Unlike his ac

Mrs. Surratt's son, John H. Surratt, escaped, made his way to Rome, and under an assumed name joined the Papal Zouaves in the town of Velletri, in Italy, forty miles from Rome. There he was identified by another American serving in the same company. The American consul was informed, and Surratt was arrested, but escaped and made his way to Egypt. Again he was arrested, and brought back to the United States. complices, who were tried by a military commission, he was indicted by the grand jury of the County of Washington, District of Columbia, and tried before a civil court, charged with "the murder of one Abraham Lincoln," and under other counts of the indictment, with "conspiracy to murder Abraham Lincoln.” Surratt escaped punishment, and lived for many years in BaltiAfter he had been set at liberty, he delivered a lecture at Rockville, Maryland, in which he stated that he had been engaged in the secret service of the Confederate Government almost constantly from the time he left college in the summer of

more.

1861, and was very active in it. He admitted his conspiracy with Booth to capture President Lincoln and carry him to Richmond, but claimed that he had no knowledge of Booth's plan to assassinate the president nor any share in the murder. Whether this was true or not, there was rather general satisfaction in the fact that he was not hanged as his mother had been. In one sense, he secured freedom by his mother's execution. That both were conspirators against the government there was no doubt. Whether the mother and son participated in the plot for the assassination is a question on which there is violent difference of opinion.

CHAPTER XXVI

THE FUNERAL OF LINCOLN

ABRAHAM LINCOLN was shot a few minutes after ten o'clock on Good Friday night, April 14, 1865. He died next morning at twenty-two minutes after seven. The morning papers in every American city announced the shooting, but the first editions were all issued before the president's death. By seven-thirty the editors in the larger cities knew that the president was dead, and by eight o'clock extra editions were on the streets informing the people that the end had come. In cities and villages more remote, and towns that had no daily papers or no facilities for extra editions, the news spread more slowly.*

Lincoln died on the morning before Easter Sunday. Easter was not so universally celebrated then as now, but that was an unusual Easter. On Palm Sunday, Robert E. Lee had met

*In the little town in Illinois where I was born, my father was on a ladder before noon, nailing up black cotton cloth on the front of his little drug store, and my aunt was mildly protesting that he was using an extravagant quantity of muslin, and telling how much it cost a yard at that time of high prices, and I, not yet four years old, was handing him the hammer, and taking in with a child's understanding the significance of the event. My father was a job printer, as well as being physician, druggist, postmaster, notary public and superintendent of the Sunday-school. That afternoon he set up and printed a placard OUR NATION MÕURNS. It was printed in red and blue, bordered with black, and was posted about town and displayed that night in a public meeting convened in the church. Father was somewhat disappointed that people who posted up his placard, freely given to the public, did not note that he had used the national colors and black, necessitating three impressions. I think he had never attempted anything quite so ambitious in the way of color work before; but nothing was too good for that day. Indeed, nothing that he could do for others was ever too good. This is my one contemporary recollection of Abraham Lincoln; I remember the morning of his death, the mighty sorrow, the fierce indignation against a "copperhead" who was alleged to have said he was glad of it, the threats that were freely made and never executed against him, and the three-color printing.

Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, and Lee had surrendered his army. The end of the war had really come. Officially, it had to continue a little while longer, but that was the end, and the nation knew it. All over the country the ministers spent that week preparing Easter sermons unlike any that they had ever preached before. Most of those sermons were finished, or practically so, before Friday night.

On Saturday morning those sermons were worthless.

The ministers who had prepared them never preached them. About eight o'clock on Saturday morning, the ministers who lived in the cities knew that they must prepare new sermons for the next morning. From that hour until noon, the ministers all over the country were receiving the same information. At least ten thousand new sermons must have been prepared that Saturday afternoon and night.

What kind of sermons were they?

A very considerable number of the sermons preached on Sunday morning, April 16, 1865, were requested for printing by the congregations to whom they were addressed, and were issued in pamphlet form. Not less than three hundred of those sermons and the sermons on the days immediately following have been discovered and duly listed in the Lincoln bibliographies.

Few people care to read these addresses, but they are of remarkable interest, and worthy of rather more than a casual examination.

All over the country, this, or something like this, occurred. The minister rose on Saturday morning with the comfortable feeling that he had only to add a few finishing touches to his Easter sermon, and it would be complete. Before he had eaten his breakfast a neighbor hastened in to tell that the president had been shot. The minister went forth to the telegraph office, or wherever the news came, and waited for the bulletins as they came over the wires, none of them bringing any hope. After the arrival of the news that the president was dead, there was a period of uncertainty, broken by the suggestion that a mass meet

ing be called for that evening. Usually it was thought better to omit the mass meeting, since the people would be coming together a few hours later on Sunday morning.

About noon the minister came home, tired, sorrowing, bewildered and tried to eat a little luncheon. After luncheon he said to his wife, "My Easter sermon will not do. And what can I say to-morrow? What theme can I select, what text can I choose, what words of wisdom or comfort can I find, for a time like this?"

He felt helpless, and yet knew that the people would come to hear him the next morning expecting from him some strong, true, helpful, uplifting word.

Ordinarily, the minister was not a great man, and did not pretend to be one. He was just an ordinary preacher, as wise and as good as the average, and no wiser and no better. Can we imagine what went on in the thought of several thousand such men as they entered their little studies on Saturday afternoon, and took down the Bible, and found that the letters blurred and that wet spots appeared on the page? These were not statesmen or theologians, for the most part, but just ordinary ministers of Christ, suddenly confronted with a task too great for any man. How did they face that duty? Apparently, they faced it worthily, and in many instances notably so.

There are sermons preached in hospitals and at least one delivered in a state prison, and there are sermons enough that are commonplace and mediocre that were preached in pulpits notable and others obscure. But on the whole the sermons of that day were good, strong, helpful discourses, and it is much to the credit of the congregations that heard them that so many of them were printed. It is also much to the credit of the ministers of that day, most of them unknown, who threw aside their prepared Easter discourses, and preached sermons that comforted and helped their people in time of national calamity. A careful review of these old discourses increases one's respect for the American pulpit.