sperately as their duty rather than in any hope, the women
refused to believe in such a possibility. But the possibility became a
certainty, and Rachel could do nothing but mourn for her children and
turn with what courage she might to face conditions full of threat of
the worst; nor even here did her courage falter, though her beliefs had
proved but broken reeds and her hopes had been swept away, leaving
nothing in their place. The South was a land of mourning, not of death
only, but of failure of a beloved and trusted cause. Meanwhile, the
North was a land of rejoicing; and her women, like all their sex, were
immoderate in their triumph, and did not consider, as had the soldiers
of the victorious armies, the feelings of those who had fought so long
and well. But there was scant opportunity for the display of triumph;
for the terrible blow which fell upon the whole country, South as well
as North, when Lincoln died under the hand of the assassin, changed joy
into mourning, and made of a victorious people one that tasted all the
bitterness of sorrow. Heavier calamity never visited this land; and its
effects upon the feeling of our womanhood were almost as far-reaching
and distressing as its political results. For the women of the South,
sore in defeat and unjustly holding Lincoln responsible for the sorrows
that had come upon them, openly rejoiced in his taking-off, and forgot
their womanhood in their exultation over the foul crime. It was the
spirit that awoke at John Brown's insurrection over again, though
differently directed; and it awakened a natural response in the North,
which saw in the exaltation of murder as the judgment of God a
perversity and even criminality of thought which could spring only from
innate baseness. Again there was misunderstanding; for the women of the
South, blinded by their prejudices and sufferings to the true character
and greatness of the dead man, held him in detestation and rejoiced over
his death as that of a hated foe, while they of the North, listening to
the cry of exultation that arose from their Southern sisters and
unmindful of the sources,--however false in themselves, yet bearing some
excuse, if only of madness,--which led to that demonstration of joy,
naturally held that Southern women were hardly better than human fiends
and utterly unworthy of the guise of womanhood.

The trial of those implicated in the assassination of Lincoln gave a
name to be remembered in the annals of