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The News of the Assassination in New York (from our Special Southern Correspondent)

IT MAY SAFELY be affirmed that in the history of mankind no civilized capital ever wore the aspect which, upon the receipt of the ghastly tidings of this morning, New York at this hour presents. There was excitement, doubtless, in Paris when Henry I of Navarre fell before Ravaillac’s dagger, – in London when Mr. Perceval yielded his life to a maniac’s bullet, – in Rome when Cardinal Rossi fell slaughtered in the public streets; but what facilities had Paris, London, or Rome for thrilling in an instant the public heart and brain compared with those which the diffusive penny press and swiftly recurring telegrams of America place at this hour at the disposal of New York? Or was there ever a nation so sensitively plastic to the impress of great national sentiments as the keenly sentient, mercurial, quick witted population which, in wild bewilderment, surges and sways through the thronging streets now under my gaze? Last night the people of this great city went to bed, lulled by their cheerful optimism, reckoning of the rebellion as already a thing of the past, little heeding difficulties, social, financial, and economical, which might well make a statesman stand aghast; believing that Abraham Lincoln and William H. Seward were the chief apostles of the revived American Union, which is described in a work recently published as synonymous with the new Heaven and the new Earth. This morning they woke to the stunning consciousness that in the night the shadow of a great and ghastly crime had passed over the land; that assassination, sudden and unlooked for, executed with remorseless cruelty, but intrepid effrontery, had engraven its hideous tale upon that page which records four years of horrors without parallel, culminating in the abhorred crime which has added to the victims of this war the names of Abraham Lincoln, and, as seems too probable, of William H. Seward. A thousand American cities, linked together by a network of lightning, have this morning awakened to the simultaneous knowledge that he who 12 hours ago was their first citizen, the chief architect of their fabric of a resuscitated Union, the figure-head round which clustered their hopes and pride, is numbered with the dead. Already over hundreds of thousands of square miles is every particular and detail of the rash and bloody deed of last night scrutinized by millions of eager eyes. It is believed that precisely at the same hour two ruffians, manifestly in concert with each other, lifted their hands against the two most valued lives of the Republican party – that upon the night of Good Friday Abraham Lincoln was stricken with his death-wound in his private box at Ford’s Theatre; that the small pocket pistol which launched the fatal bullet was found, still smoking, on the floor of the box; that the undaunted assassin, having entered the box from the rear, stretched his hand over Mrs. Lincoln’s shoulder until the muzzle of his pistol almost touched the President’s head; that the bullet, designedly (as it would seem) propelled by a small charge of powder, did not pass through the head, but lodged in the brain about three inches from its point of entrance; that the ruffian who fired it, rescuing himself without difficulty from Colonel Parker, of General Grant’s Staff, who was in the box with Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln, calmly stepped from the private box upon the stage; that, brandishing with melodramatic gesture a naked dagger in his hand, he pronounced the well-known motto of the State of Virginia, ‘Sic semper tyrannis,’ in apparent justification of a deed against the atrocity of which all that is noble and manly in that proud old State will recoil with indignant execration; that, turning with unruffled imperturbability, he left the stage and made his exit from the theatre by one of the side scenes with which he seemed familiar, and, mounting a horse which was attached to a tree in the immediate neighbourhood of the theatre, galloped swiftly off into the night, and was lost.

But it was reserved for his accomplice to exhibit still more undaunted nerve, although wherever this tale is read humanity will shudder at the heartless cruelty which could instigate an assassin to force his way to the bedside of a suffering old man already half dead, and to anticipate by a savage act of vindictive butchery the fatal event whereby Mr. Seward’s life seemed yesterday but too gravely menaced. It must be remembered that Mr. Seward is 65 years old, and it would appear there are justifiable grounds for the general belief that the sufferer, if ever he arose from his sick bed again, could scarcely have recovered, even without the horrible events of last night, from a fracture of the arm and jawbone, and from the exhaustion which is known to have followed his accident, without a sensible abatement of those singular powers, physical and mental, which have enabled him during these last four years to flood every European Foreign-office with a deluge of despatches such as never issued in like space of time from any single pen. Boldly entering Mr. Seward’s residence under the pretext of being the bearer of some important medicine which Dr. Verdi designed for his patient, the assassin, undeterred by three men who attempted to interpose, forced a road to his victim’s bedside, and with his knife deeply wounded Dr. Seward’s face and throat. Closing with Mr. Frederick Seward (the Assistant-Secretary of State, and eldest son to the sufferer), the ruffian dealt him a blow upon the head which fractured his skull in two places, and has probably terminated Mr. Frederick Seward’s earthly career. Almost simultaneously he poniarded a male nurse in attendance upon Mr. Seward, inflicting wounds since pronounced to be mortal. Upon Major Seward (another son, if I am not mistaken, of the Secretary of State) the miscreant inflicted injuries which, though not likely to be fatal, effectually prevented any further interference with his own escape from under a roof which had looked down within a few seconds upon the grim horrors of a fourfold assassination. Mounting his horse outside the door he saved himself, like his associate by swift flight, and up to the present hour both have escaped detection and capture. The public voice seems unanimous in pronouncing the assassin of President Lincoln to be an actor named Wilkes Booth (the brother of the more celebrated Edwin Booth, who has lately won high reputation in this city by his admirable impersonation for 100 nights of Hamlet), whose face, it is asserted, was recognized by many spectators acquainted with him. As I write, revelations flashed along the electric wires, indicating the existence of a preconcerted conspiracy, in which Wilkes Booth was a principal, and which was designed to have taken effect on the 4th of March, are placarded at the corners of the street, and devoured by thousands of hungry eyes. The feeling with which the brief record ‘Abraham Lincoln expired at 22 minutes past 7 this morning’ is read may be conceived by those of your readers who are acquainted with the character and temperament of Americans.

How shall I describe the scene which already New York presents? There is, as I have already said, no city upon earth permeated by nerves of such exquisite sensibility, vibrating at the slightest access of popular fever, carrying spasmodic sensation through a dense mass of human beings, which in any other capital I have ever seen would take hours to learn and understand what is here known, felt, and appreciated in a few passionate seconds. In a hundred instances during the last four years your correspondents have portrayed the fever fits of New York – mass meetings in this Square or that, processions longer than that which welcomed the Prince of Wales, convulsions which shook Wall-street and Broadway like an all pervading ague – but I doubt whether a scene like that of this morning has yet been witnessed. The chronic excitement of this war influences this strange population as cumulative poisons are said to act upon their victims. Instead of a dispersion of electricity through the medium of these popular thunderbursts, the excitement of the mass seems to accumulate and be hoarded; until, upon the occasion of each recurrent explosion, the reserve of delirious passion is greater and greater in volume. There have often before been paroxysms of sanguine intoxication in this city, or of depression, if not of despair, but never before has the thunderbolt fallen from a smiling sky, never has the proud and swelling note of victory been converted in the twinkling of an eye into the wail of a nation. Abraham Lincoln had grown to be regarded, in a higher degree than any soldier or sailor, as the impersonation of the war power of the Union. Creeping into Washington in disguise and with timid irresolution to be inaugurated as chief magistrate upon the 4th of March, 1861, he lived so to conciliate and, within four brief years, to win popular affection that his second inauguration upon the 4th of March, 1865, was the ovation of an almost unanimous people. The estimates of his character and of the calibre of his intellect since he was suddenly tossed to the surface of a great nation have been numerous and contradictory; but the opinion seems to be daily gaining ground that impartial history will assign to him one of the highest places among the statesmen who have hitherto presided over the North in the supreme agony of the nation. There can be quoted against Mr. Lincoln no such extravagant vaunts or unseemly denunciations of others, no such rash predictions or disingenuous colourings, as crowd the despatches of Mr. Seward; on the other hand, there are thousands of Mr. Lincoln’s anecdotes and quaint conceits, none of which fail to indicate shrewdness, while many reveal a singular depth of insight into the circumstances under which they were spoken. It was mentioned to me by one of the Southern Peace Commissioners that at the recent conference in Hampton Roads he was deeply impressed by the ascendancy of Mr. Lincoln throughout the interview over Mr. Seward. The flags at half-mast, the festoons of crape hung out by each store in succession, and already creeping along the whole length of Broadway upon either side of the street, the eager closing of shutters and suspension of business in Wall-street, the feverish bewilderment of thousands, who can as yet but half realize the truth, the agitated swaying to and fro of hurrying multitudes in the streets, the frenzied accents of grief and rage, the tolling bells, the deep boom of the minute guns, are fitting expressions of the public grief, for they indicate not only the lamentation that a just, temperate, calm, and well-intentioned statesman has died in the track of duty by the most appalling of deaths, but that in one of the most awful of crises which ever overtook a nation his successor should be Andrew Johnson.

Dreadful as is the fashion of his death, if ever man was felix opportunitate mortis that man may be pronounced to be Abraham Lincoln. The difficulties which he has surmounted during his first term of office, stupendous as they have been, are feathers, trifles, air bubbles when compared with those which await his successor during the four coming years. But there can hardly be two opinions that in the interest of the South no event could be more prejudicial, or more deeply to be deprecated, than the foul assassination of last night. There breathes nowhere in the Northern States a partisan so blinded by sectional passion or so exasperated against Secessia as to imagine that the execrable crime of which Washington was last night the scene could be regarded by Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and the men who share their confidence, otherwise than with unmeasured detestation and poignant regret. This is not the place nor the moment for attempting to expatiate upon the character of Mr. Davis. But having long occupied a position which afforded peculiar facilities for understanding him, I cannot forbear briefly saying that, be his faults what they may, the time is not far distant when history will mete out to Mr. Davis that justice which is at present denied to him not only, as is natural, by Northerners, but also by many of his own ignorant and ungrateful countrymen. Meantime the natural vindictiveness, consequent upon the fearful crime of last night, will be employed to intensify Northern bitterness against Mr. Davis. There is already a disposition to draw a line of demarcation between him and General Lee, which none would resent more than the latter. The advocates of harshness will be fearfully augmented by the crime of last night, against which Mr. Davis, whose leniency throughout this war has amounted to a weakness, and who under terrible provocation has never permitted one act of retaliation, would revolt with un-utterable horror. The denunciations of General Grant for his liberal-terms to the Confederates who surrendered to him will be fiercer than ever, especially those which proceed from General Butler, and which are embittered with obvious personal malignity against the General. It has always seemed to me that the surrender of General Lee and the opportunity for generosity so admirably seized by General Grant bridged over the gulf which divides the two sections to a degree which none could have hoped two months ago. But the bullet of a dastardly assassin has in one instant neutralized the effect of the great stride towards conciliation so happily taken by General Grant.

This is not strictly an obituary, but it conveys much of the sense of horror and the awareness of the severity and abruptness of America’s loss which was felt on both sides of the Atlantic. Lincoln’s assassination is compared to those of Henry IV of France in May 1610, of the British Prime Minister Spencer Perceval in May 1812, and of Count (not Cardinal) Rossi, the Papal Minister of Justice, in November 1849. On 14 April 1865 Lincoln had been shot in the head while attending a performance of the play Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theater in Washington. He died the next day. After firing the fatal shot, his assassin, John Wilkes Booth, jumped from Lincoln’s box, on to the stage (breaking his leg in the process). Witnesses differed as to whether he shouted ‘Sic semper tyrannis’ or ‘The South is avenged’. Booth was shot while resisting arrest on 26 April. Lincoln was buried at Springfield, Illinois, on 4 May 1865.