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WAS THE NORTHERN CAUSE SUCCESSFUL?
As to the cause of which he was the official head being successful, we will only remark that it was certainly successful in preventing the establishment of the Southern Confederacy within certain territorial limits; but whether successful in any other sense, remains yet to be determined. The Washington Post of August 14, 1906, said:
"Let us be frank about it. The day the people of the North responded to Abraham Lincoln's call for troops to coerce sovereign States, the Republic died and the Nation was born."
And a Massachusetts man has written of the Confederates that—
"Such character and achievement were not all in vain; that though the Confederacy fell as an actual physical power, it lives eternally in its just cause—the cause of constitutional liberty."
MANNER OF LINCOLN'S DEATH AND THE MURDER OF MRS. SURRATT.
As to the manner of Mr. Lincoln's death, aside from the abhorrence with which we regard and denounce every form of assassination, we have to remark: (1) That it really exalted his name and fame as nothing before it happened had done, or, in our opinion, could have done; and (2) as dastardly, as cowardly and cruel as that deed was, it was, in our opinion, not so dastardly, cowardly or cruel, and no more criminal in the eye of the law, than the murder of Mrs. Surratt, an nnocent woman, by Andrew Johnson, Edwin M. Stanton, Joseph Holt, David Hunter and their wicked and cowardly associates. The act of Booth was that of a frenzied fanatic, taking his life in his own hands, and attempting to avenge his people's wrongs by ridding the world of the man he believed to be the author of those wrongs; the act of Johnson, Stanton and others in murdering Mrs. Surratt was the deliberate and criminal act of cruel, cowardly men, perpetrated on a helpless, harmless and innocent woman, through instrumentalities and forms as cruel as any that were ever devised in the darkest ages of the world, but by methods and at a time when the perpetrators knew that their cowardly bodies were safe from all harm. (See DeWitt's Assassination of Lincoln, p. 92, et seq.) This woman was tried and convicted by a military commission, of which General David Hunter was the president. It was pointed out to the so-called court, by that
