The result was never in doubt.  By September Fremont and Cochrane both withdrew, and in November Lincoln and Johnson were elected, and on March 4, 1865, were sworn into office.

%478.  The Murder of Lincoln%.—­By that time the Confederacy was doomed.  Sherman had made his march to the sea; Savannah and Charleston were in Union hands, and Lee hard pressed at Richmond.  April 9 he surrendered, and on April 14, 1865, the fourth anniversary of the evacuation of Fort Sumter, Anderson, now a major general, visited the fort which he had so gallantly defended, and in the presence of the army and navy raised the tattered flag he pulled down in 1861.

That night Lincoln went to Ford’s Theater in Washington, and while he was sitting quietly in his box, an actor named John Wilkes Booth came in and shot him through the head, causing a wound from which the President died early next morning.  His deed done, the assassin leaped from the box to the stage, and shouting, “Sic semper tyrannis” (So be it always to tyrants), the motto of Virginia, made his escape in the confusion of the moment, and mounting a horse, rode away.

The act of Booth was one result of a conspiracy, the details of which were soon discovered and the criminals punished.  Booth was hunted by soldiers and shot in a barn in Virginia.  His accomplices were either hanged or imprisoned for life.[1]

[Footnote 1:  The best account of the murder of Lincoln is given in “Four Lincoln Conspiracies” in the Century Magazine for April, 1896.]

%479.  Andrew Johnson, President.%—­Lincoln had not been many hours dead when Andrew Johnson, as the Constitution provides, took the oath of office and became President of the United States.  Before him lay the most gigantic task ever given to any President.

%480.  Reconstruction.%—­To dispose of the Confederate soldiers and politicians was an easy matter; but to decide what to do with the Confederate states proved most difficult.  Lincoln had always held that they could not secede.  If they could not secede, they had never been out of the Union, and if they had never been out of the Union, they were entitled, as of old, to send senators and representatives to Congress.

[Illustration:  Andrew Johnson]

But whether the states had or had not seceded, the old state governments of 1861, and the relations these governments once held with the Union, were destroyed by the so-called secession, and it was necessary to define some way by which they might be reestablished, or, as it was called, “reconstructed.”

Toward the end of 1863, accordingly, when the Union army had acquired possession of Tennessee, Arkansas, and Louisiana, Lincoln issued his “Amnesty Proclamation” and began the work of reconstruction.  He promised, in the first place, that, with certain exceptions, which he mentioned, he would pardon[1] every man who should lay down his arms and swear to support and obey the Constitution, and the Emancipation Proclamation.  He promised, in the second place, that whenever, in any state that had attempted secession, voters equal in number to one tenth of those who in 1860 voted for presidential electors, should take this oath and organize a state government, he would recognize it; that is, he would consider the state “reconstructed,” loyal, and entitled to representation in Congress.