neither
one--the many statements to the contrary, notwithstanding--ever
indicated subsequently any regret or admitted that the incident was a
mistake.

During the furore over this incident both the President and Mr.
Washington received many threats against their lives. The President
had the Secret Service to protect him, while Mr. Washington had no
such reliance. His co-workers surrounded him with such precautions as
they could, and his secretary accumulated during this period enough
threatening letters to fill a desk drawer. It was not discovered
until some years after that one of these threats had been followed by
the visit to Tuskegee of a hired assassin. A strange Negro was hurt in
jumping off the train before it reached the Tuskegee Institute
station. There being no hospital for Negroes in the town of Tuskegee
he was taken to the hospital of the Institute, where he was cared for
and nursed for several weeks before he was able to leave. Mr.
Washington was absent in the North during all of this time. Many
months later this Negro confessed that he had come to Tuskegee in the
pay of a group of white men in Louisiana for the purpose of
assassinating Booker Washington. He said that he became so ashamed of
himself while being cared for by the doctors and nurses employed by
the very man he had come to murder that he left as soon as he was able
to do so instead of waiting to carry out his purpose on the return of
his victim, as he had originally planned to do.

Booker Washington, with all his philosophy and capacity for rising
above the personal, was probably more deeply pained by this affair
than any other in his whole career. His pain was, however, almost
solely on Mr. Roosevelt's account. He felt keenly hurt and chagrined
that Mr. Roosevelt, whom he so intensely admired, and who was doing so
much, not only for his own race but for the whole South as he
believed, should suffer all this abuse and even vilification on his
account. President Roosevelt evidently realized something of how he
felt, for in a letter to him written at this time he added this
postscript: "By the way, don't worry about _me_; it will all come
right in time, and if I have helped by ever so little 'the ascent of
man' I am more than satisfied."

Probably no single public event ever gave Booker Washington greater
pleasure than Colonel Roosevelt's triumphant election to the
Presidency in 1904. The day after the election he wrote the President
the fo