followers and sympathizers by the Rebel leaders and their chief
accomplices in the North--had basely skulked into the box, behind Mr.
Lincoln, mortally wounded him with a pistol-bullet, and escaped--after
stabbing Major Rathbone for vainly striving to arrest the vile
assassin's flight.

Thus this great and good Ruler of our reunited People was foully
stricken down in the very moment of his triumph; when the Union troops
were everywhere victorious; when Lee had surrendered the chief Army of
the downfallen Confederacy; when Johnston was on the point of
surrendering the only remaining Rebel force which could be termed an
Army; on the self-same day too, which saw the identical flag of the
Union, that four years before had been sadly hauled down from the
flagstaff of Fort Sumter, triumphantly raised again over that historic
fort; when, the War being at an end, everything in the future looked
hopeful; at the very time when his merciful and kindly mind was
doubtless far away from the mimic scenes upon which he looked, revolving
beneficent plans for reconstructing and rebuilding the waste and
desolate places in the South which War had made; at this time, of all
times, when his clear and just perceptions and firm patriotism were most
needed,

[For his last public words, two nights before, had been: "In the
present 'situation,' as the phrase goes, it may be my duty to make
some new announcement to the people of the South. I am
CONSIDERING, and shall not fail to act when satisfied that action
will be proper."]

alike by conquerors and conquered, to guide and aid the Nation in the
difficult task of reconstruction, and of the new departure, looming up
before it, with newer and broader and better political issues upon which
all Patriot might safely divide, while all the old issues of
States-rights, Secession, Free-Trade, and Slavery, and all the mental
and moral leprosy growing out of them, should lie buried far out of
sight as dead-and-gone relics of the cruel and devastating War which
they alone had brought on! Abraham Lincoln never spoke again. The
early beams of the tomorrow's sun touched, but failed to warm, the
lifeless remain of the great War-President and Liberator, as they were
borne, in mournful silence, back to the White House, mute and ghastly
witness of the sheer desperation of those who, although armed Rebellion,
in the open field, by the fair and legitimate modes of Military warfare,
ha