It is startling to contemplate the fearful responsibility which Booth assumed when he fired that shot.  So far from benefiting the South, he did it incalculable harm, for the North was thoroughly aroused by the deed.  Thousands and thousands flocked to see the dead President as he lay in state at the Capitol, and in the larger cities in which his funeral procession paused on its way to his home in Springfield.  The whole country was in mourning, as for its father; business was practically suspended, and the people seemed stunned by the great calamity.  That so gentle a man should have been murdered wakened, deep down in the heart of the North, a fierce resentment; the feelings of kindliness for a vanquished foe were, for the moment, swept away in anger; and the North turned upon the South with stern face and shining eyes.  The wild and foolish assassin brought down upon the heads of his own people such a wrath as the great conflict had not awakened.  We shall see how bitter was the retribution.

Not then so fully as now was Lincoln’s greatness understood.  He has come to personify for us the triumphs and glories, the sadness and the pathos, of the great struggle which he guided.  His final martyrdom seems almost a fitting crown for his achievements.  It has, without doubt, done much to secure him the exalted niche which he occupies in the hearts of the American people, whom, in a way, he died to save.  Had he lived through the troubled period of Reconstruction which followed, he might have emerged with a fame less clear and shining; and yet the hand which guided the country through four years of Civil War, was without doubt the one best fitted to save it from the misery and disgrace which lay in store for it.  But speculations as to what might have been are vain and idle.  What was, we know; and above the clouds of conflict, Lincoln’s figure looms, serene and venerable.  Two of his own utterances reveal him as the words of no other man can—­his address on the battlefield of Gettysburg, and his address at his second inauguration—­but two months after he was laid to rest, James Russell Lowell, at the services in commemoration of the three hundredth anniversary of Harvard College, paid him one of the most eloquent tributes ever paid any man, concluding with the words: 

“Great captains, with their guns and drums;
  Disturb our judgment for the hour,
But at last silence comes;
  These all are gone, and, standing like a tower,
Our children shall behold his fame,
  The kindly-earnest, brave, foreseeing man;
Sagacious, patient, dreading praise, not blame;
  New birth of our new soil, the first American.”