e time, a futile attempt was made upon the life of Seward.
Booth temporarily escaped. Later he was overtaken and shot. His
accomplices were hanged.

The passage of sixty years has proved fully necessary to the placing of
Lincoln in historic perspective. No President, in his own time, with the
possible exception of Washington, was so bitterly hated and so fiercely
reviled. On the other hand, none has been the object of such intemperate
hero-worship. However, the greatest of the land were, in the main, quick
to see him in perspective and to recognize his historic significance. It
is recorded of Davis that in after days he paid a beautiful tribute to
Lincoln and said, "Next to the destruction of the Confederacy, the death
of Abraham Lincoln was the darkest day the South has known."

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

There are two general histories, of conspicuous ability, that deal with
this period:

J. F. Rhodes, "History of the United States from the Compromise of
1850", 7 vols. (1893-1906), and J. B. McMaster, "History of the People
of the United States", 7 vols. (1883-1912). McMaster has the more
"modern" point of view and is excellent but dry, without any sense of
narrative. Rhodes has a somewhat older point of view. For example, he
makes only a casual reference, in a quotation, to the munitions
problem of 1861, though analyzing with great force and candor such
constitutional issues as the arrests under the suspension of the writ
of habeas corpus. The other strong points in his work are its sense
of narrative, its freedom from hero-worship, its independence of
conventional views of Northern leaders. As to the South, it suffers from
a certain Narrowness of vision due to the comparative scantiness of the
material used. The same may be said of McMaster.

For Lincoln, there is no adequate brief biography. Perhaps the best is
the most recent, "Abraham Lincoln", by Lord Charnwood ("Makers of the
Nineteenth Century", 1917). It has a kind of cool detachment that hardly
any biographer had shown previously, and yet this coolness is joined
with extreme admiration. Short biographies worth considering are John
T. Morse, Jr., "Abraham Lincoln" ("American Statesmen" Series, 2 vols.,
1893), and Ida M. Tarbell, "Life of Abraham Lincoln", 2 vols. (1900).
The official biography is in ten volumes, "Abraham Lincoln, a History",
by his secretaries, John G. Nicolay and John Hay (1890). It is a
priceless document and as such is little likely