This news was disheartening in the extreme; and the stringent measures the Federal Government was now preparing to adopt were perhaps the result of the calamity that had befallen the South, no less than the North, in the assassination of President Lincoln. Throughout every State of the then dying Confederacy there was but one feeling—that of abhorrence of the crime, and outspoken regret for its commission. The idea that any Confederate, whether in the army or out of it, had, through a feeling of vengeance and with the approbation of the country, suggested, countenanced, or planned such an act of barbarism, could only be entertained by those who were ignorant of the history of that period, and of the characteristics of the Southern people. Certainly Mr. Lincoln's sad end can no more be laid to the account of the Confederacy, or of any of those who formed part of its government, than the lamentable death of the late President Garfield can be attributed to the Republican party and its leaders. The South knew that, had President Lincoln's life been spared, he would have ratified the treaty entered upon by the commanders of the two armies then in the field; for, as both General Sherman and Admiral Porter testify, ‘he wanted peace on almost any terms,’ and his greatest desire was ‘to get the men composing the Confederate armies back to their homes, at work on their farms and in their shops.’1 It was the overstrained, embittered zeal of the new Federal Administration—born of a double crime, murder and apostasy—that destroyed in its bud the work of peace and reunion, so ably and liberally prepared —to their honor be it said—by Generals Johnston and Sherman.
This text is part of:
[402]
in the following telegram to the Confederate Secretary of War:
1 General Sherman's ‘Memoirs,’ vol. II., p. 326. See also ‘Admiral Porter's Account of General Sherman's Interview with Mr. Lincoln,’ Ibid., pp. 328, 329.
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