the ku-klux, the shot-gun, and the "bloody shirt” was inaugurated in the South, and the country entered upon a decade of decade of angry turmoil. Stanton left the death chamber to order the arrest of Jacob Thompson, the Confederate emissary, with whom the President had refused to interfere the day before. Extreme men in high places hailed the accession of Vice-president Johnson to the Presidency as "a godsend to the country." The new President delighted them by declaring "treason must be made infamous, and traitors must be punished." Senator Wade of Ohio, the President of the Senate, exclaimed, "By the gods, there will be no trouble now in running the government." A caucus of Republican senators was held within a few hours of Lincoln's death, and plans were laid for overturning his projects for the reconstruction of the South. Grant himself was swept into the current of retaliation. "Extreme rigor will have to be observed," he said in a severe military despatch, "whilst assassination remains the order of the day with the rebels." Stanton proclaimed an offer of one hundred thousand dollars for the arrest of Jefferson Davis as an accomplice in the murder of Lincoln, and for two years the President of the fallen Confederacy was held in prison on that and other charges without trial. Happily history acquits him and all responsible men of any knowledge of or sympathy with the assassina tion. Booth was hunted down and shot, while four persons convicted of conspiring with him, including a woman, Mrs. Surratt, were hanged. A physician, who set the broken leg of the assassin, and two other men were sentenced to banishment for life on Dry Tortugas, one of the Florida keys, and the man who bored the hole in the theater box was condemned to pass six years on that remote and lonely island. The future held in store for the innocent companions of Lincoln on the night of the assassination a fate not less terrible than that which befell the guilty companions of the assassin. The widow's always frail nervous organization was wrecked by the shock. She raved throughout the dreadful night that followed, and throwing herself upon the corpse in the morning, it was with difficulty that she was persuaded to leave. As she was led to the White House carriage which had stood at the door through the long hours, she cast a glance at the theater and cried in bitterness, "Oh, that horrible house!" The only mitigation of her misfortune lay in the small competence which her husband left her and her children. Aside from the real estate, which he owned when he went to Washington and which he still held at his death, he died possessed of a personal estate valued at more than one hundred thousand dollars. Since he never was a money maker and was obliged to borrow in order to pay his expenses in his first months in the White House, he must have been fortunate in the choice of a wise financial adviser, thus to have accumulated amid absorbing cares a personal property, equaling in value the total of the salary he received as President. Mrs. Lincoln went to live in England and France, but she found no refuge, even in far-away lands, from the relentless specter which pursued her. The picture of the frightful scene in the theater was imprinted forever on her broken mind. She continually dwelt on it in her thought and conversation. For some time she was in a private asylum near Chicago, while her later years were passed in a sister's home at Springfield. The young couple who were her guests in the box, married, but the wife was slain by the crazed husband. Lincoln's was the kindest fate of all. His body was removed from the modest dwelling of the tailor to the Green Room of the White House, where it was enthroned on a splendid catafalque. There it lay in state, resting beneath the roof where, living, he had found only toil and care. A peace, not of this world, was in the upturned face, in striking con trast to the turbulent passions which disturbed the men who gathered about the bier. Seward, who had been stabbed while in bed by one of the conspirators and narrowly escaped death, was not told of Booth's crime. He could only wonder why his kind and thoughtful chief did not call, for he felt he would be the first to visit him in his affliction. On Sunday, when he caught a glimpse from where he lay of a flag at half staff, the meaning of it flashed on his mind. The funeral was held in the White House on Wednesday, and all the people of the North reverently kept the day. Not a kinsman of the lonely man was among the mourners, but races and sects were knit together in a kinship of sorrow for this brother of man. Queen Victoria sent her condolences to Mrs. Lincoln, "as from a widow to a widow." More than kingly honors were paid the mortal remains of one who entered the world through a hovel of logs. He was borne to the Capitol, where many thought his appropriate sepulture was in the crypt built for the bones of Washington, his only peer in American history. Illinois, however, claimed his dust, as the rightful heritage of her soil. The prairies must be hallowed by the grave. of the first great man to be nurtured by them. Cities and states begged the privilege of honoring |