Benson J. Lossing, Pictorial Field Book of the Civil War. Volume 3.

[570] Suspicion pointed toward Booth as the murderer of the President. Cavalry and a heavy police force speedily shot out from the capital in radiating lines, in search of the offenders, but without success, when, at the end of three days, Colonel Lafayette C. Baker, the Chief Detective of the War Department, who had been at the head of the secret service from the beginning of the struggle, returned to Washington, and skillfully formed a plan for the service of justice in the matter. Men were designated as the accomplices of Booth, now known to have been the assassin of the President, and cavalry and police were sent in pursuit of them. Booth was overtaken in Virginia, below Fredericksburg, concealed in a barn.

April 21, 1865.

He refused to surrender. The barn was fired, and the assassin was shot by a sergeant named Boston Corbett. Payne, who had attempted to kill Mr. Seward, was soon arrested, with other accomplices of Booth, and some of them, with a woman named Surratt, whose house, in Washington City, appears to have been a place of rendezvous for Booth and his accomplices, were tried, by a military commission, for murder, and hung.

July 7.

Others were imprisoned.¹

The President's body was taken to the Executive Mansion, and embalmed; and in the “East room” ² of that mansion, funeral services were held on Wednesday, the 19th of April. Then the body was taken, in solemn procession, by way of Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York City, and Albany, and thence westward, to his private home, in Springfield, Illinois, and buried. It everywhere received tokens of the people's love and grief. Funeral honors were displayed in many cities of the land, and the nation was really in mourning and tears. But the Republic survived the shock which might have toppled down, in other lands, an empire or a dynasty. By a seeming oversight in the managers of the assassin scheme, Andrew Johnson, the Vice-President, was not included in their list of victims. He, who must legally succeed the dead President, seems not to have been put in jeopardy by the Conspirators; and six hours after Mr. Lincoln expired, Chief-Justice Chase administered to him the oath of office as President of the Republic. Thoughtful people, who regarded private virtue as the basis of public integrity, and who sadly remembered the conduct of the Vice-President only a few weeks before, which shocked the moral sense of right-minded citizens, were filled with gloomy forebodings concerning the future of the Republic — for the most profound wisdom and exalted virtue in the Chief Magistrate were needed at that critical time. He took the chair of Washington, assumed the reins of Government as Chief Magistrate, and invited the members of Mr. Lincoln's cabinet to retain their offices under his administration.³

With the surrender of Lee, the war was virtually ended. Although he