Horace Greeley, The American Conflict: A History of the Great Rebellion in the United States of America, 1860-65: its Causes, Incidents, and Results: Intended to exhibit especially its moral and political phases with the drift and progress of American opinion respecting human slavery from 1776 to the close of the War for the Union. Volume II.

[750] Seward shrieked “murder” from the window and the porter ran into the street crying for help. The assassin, aware that another moment's delay must seal his doom, now broke from the soldier's grasp, and rushed to escape; meeting at the head of the first flight of stairs Maj. Augustus Seward, another son of the Secretary, whom he struck with his dagger; being next confronted, just below, by Mr. Hansell, one of the Secretary's attendants, whom he stabbed in the back; thus clearing his way to the street, where he mounted a horse he had left there, and rode rapidly off unheeded.

The quiet accession to the Presidency of Vice-President Johnson--the funeral honors to the good, beloved President, so suddenly snatched away at the moment when long years of trial and disaster had at length been crowned by a fullness of triumph and gladness rarely paralleled — the slow and long dubious recovery of the stricken Secretary and his self-devoted son — the flight, pursuit, and capture of Booth, so severely wounded by his captors that he died a few hours afterward — the arraignment, trial, and conviction before a military court of Payne and several of their fellow-conspirators or accomplices — may here be hurriedly passed over, as non-essential to this history. Not so the burst of unmeasured, indignant wrath, the passionate grief, the fierce cry for vengeance, which the crime of the assassins very generally incited. Mr. Lincoln was widely known as radically, immovably averse to aught that savored of severity in dealing with the defeated insurgents. No “railing accusations,” no incitements to severity or bitterness on the part of the loyal, had ever found utterance through his lips. Inflexibly resolved that the Rebellion should be put down, he was equally determined that its upholders, having submitted to the Nation's authority, should experience to the utmost the Nation's magnanimity. Such was the palpable drift of his speech, delivered two nights prior to his death, as of all his prior inculcations. And now, the butchery of this gentle, forbearing spirit, by the hand, hardly less blundering than bloody, of a pro-Rebel assassin, incited a fierce, agonized, frantic yell for retaliation, that, for the moment, could only be braved at the cost of great personal obloquy and sacrifice; and the appearance of an official proclamation,¹ signed by the new President, and counter-signed by William Hunter, as acting Secretary of State, charging that the appalling crime of Booth and his associates had been

incited, concerted, and procured by and between Jefferson Davis, late of Richmond, Va., and Jacob Thompson, Clement C. Clay, Beverly Tucker, George N. Sanders, W. C. Cleary, and other Rebels and traitors against the Government of the United States, harbored in Canada,

and offering a reward of $100,000 for the arrest of Davis, and of $25,000 to $10,000 each for the other persons thus denounced, was widely hailed as justifying the suspicions already current, and rendering the Confede-rates as a body morally guilty of the murder of Mr. Lincoln, and justly liable therefor to condign punishment.

Gen. Lee had only assumed to surrender the army under his immediate command; though he manifestly realized that this capitulation was