that on the evening of April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theater. While Lincoln lingered until the following morning, this event was a tragedy for the nation.
Ulysses Grant was also supposed to be killed. Booth had thought the Grants would be at Ford's Theater with the Lincolns, but the press reports were inaccurate - the ladies really did not like one another. Grant boarded a train for Philadelphia, and apparently another member of the conspiracy attempted to kill him, but was unable to gain access to the compartment wherein the Grants were. Similarly, an attempt was made on Secretary of State Seward, but the gun misfired.
I want to offer a very few thoughts below the fold as part of this commemoration.
When Booth jumped from the Lincoln's box to the stage, catching his spur on a Treasury flag and fracturing his leg, he said clearly the Virginia State Motto, derived from Shakespeare''s Julius Caesar: Sic Sempter Tyrannis - and yes those words are still on the seal on the Virginia State Flag. He may also have said "The South is Avenged!"
When Lincoln passed at 7;22 the next morning, Secretary of War Edward Stanton said something, usually reported as "Now he belongs to the ages" although it could have been "Now he belongs to the Angels"
For all the hatred of Booth and his fellow conspirators, I cannot help but think had Lincoln lived we never would have reached the point of Radical Reconstruction. He had picked a Southern Democrat as his running mate for his second term, and there should be no doubt that he was not intending to be vindictive towards the South. Lincoln had commenced his second term only 41 days before he was shot, on March 4, 1865. The words he spoke that day may be his most important - and powerful - speech, perhaps even more so than Gettsyburg.
He recapitulated the history that had brought them to this point, looking back to his first inaugural:
On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago, all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil-war. All dreaded it -- all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war -- seeking to dissolve the Union, and divide effects, by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came.
He made clear the causus belli:
One eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the Southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union, even by war; while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it.
He laid out the seeimngly irreconcilable nature of the confrontation, in a quasi-religious framing.
Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses! for it must needs be that offenses come; but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh!"
It is worth noting that while Lincoln never officially belonged to a church - as President he was most frequently in attendance at New York Avenue Presbyterian - he may well have been the President most familiar with the Bible.
He spoke bluntly about slavery:
If we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope -- fervently do we pray -- that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away.
Hoping that war would end, but also knowing something more, which he made clear to those assembled for the occasion:
Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether."
The damage done - morally and spiritually - by slavery needed to be addressed. He was as he had been since Antietam with the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation (an action urged upon him by abolitionists and Radical Republicans) committed to the abolition of slavery. The Congress had already passed and sent to the states the 13th Amendment banning the practice, although it would not be fully ratified until December, well after Lincoln's death.
But Lincoln was not vindictive. Having fought to preserve the Union, his vision was to heal the Union, and the speech ends with those magnificent words that demonstrated the largeness of his heart and spirit:
With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan -- to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.
Imagining how history could be different - if only . . . . We cannot know for sure. I know this. Lincoln was still relatively young - only 56. He was by the end of the War a figure of towering moral and political authority.
Did he dream of his own death only a few days before? Did Martin Luther King anticipate his own assassination the next day in his own final public address? We can never be sure.
Some men confront the real possibility of their own death, and yet it motivates them to continue even more firmly on the path that is right.
Others perhaps worry about political death and shy from the possible confrontation whose conclusion could mean either political death or political immortality.
I have always considered Lincoln the greatest of our Presidents, and not merely for his magnificent command of language.
I could not let this anniversary of his assassination passed unnoticed.
But I also refuse to merely note it, which is why I look back to those words which tell us how far he had helped bring us, and pointed us at a path that had it been followed could have made this nation very different.
Oh Captain, my Captain as wrote Walt Whitman.
I remember.
Yes, I mourn for what could have been.
But I also remember that possible could have been would never have been even on a distant horizon absent the life and work Lincoln gave to the nation.
Peace.