This was John Wilkes Booth, brother of a famous actor then playing “Hamlet” in Boston.  He was an actor too, and an athletic and daring youth.  In him that peculiarly ferocious political passion which occasionally showed itself among Southerners was further inflamed by brandy and by that ranting mode of thought which the stage develops in some few.  He was the leader of a conspiracy which aimed at compassing the deaths of others besides Lincoln.  Andrew Johnson, the Vice-President, was to die.  So was Seward.  That same night one of the conspirators, a gigantic boy of feeble mind, gained entrance to Seward’s house and wounded three people, including Seward himself, who was lying already injured in bed and received four or five wounds.  Neither he nor the others died.  The weak-minded or mad boy, another man, whose offense consisted in having been asked to kill Johnson and refused to do so, and another alleged conspirator, a woman, were hanged after a court-martial whose proceedings did credit neither to the new President nor to others concerned.  Booth himself, after many adventures, was shot in a barn in which he stood at bay and which had been set on fire by the soldiers pursuing him.  During his flight he is said to have felt much aggrieved that men did not praise him as they had praised Brutus and Cassius.

There were then in the South many broken and many permanently embittered men, indeed the temper which would be glad at Lincoln’s death could be found here and there and notably among the partisans of the South in Washington.  But, if it be wondered what measure of sympathy there was for Booth’s dark deed, an answer lies in the fact that the murder of Lincoln would at no time have been difficult for a brave man.  Fair blows were now as powerless as foul to arrest the end.  On the very morning when Lincoln and Grant at the Cabinet had been telling of their hopes and fears for Sherman, Sherman himself at Raleigh in North Carolina had received and answered a letter from Johnston opening negotiations for a peaceful surrender.  Three days later he was starting by rail for Greensborough when word came to him from the telegraph operator that an important message was upon the wire.  He went to the telegraph box and heard it.  Then he swore the telegraph operator to secrecy, for he feared that some provocation might lead to terrible disorders in Raleigh, if his army, flushed with triumph, were to learn, before his return in peace, the news that for many days after hushed their accustomed songs and shouts and cheering into a silence which was long remembered.  He went off to meet Johnston and requested to be with him alone in a farmhouse near.  There he told him of the murder of Lincoln.  “The perspiration came out in large drops on Johnston’s forehead,” says Sherman, who watched him closely.  He exclaimed that it was a disgrace to the age.  Then he asked to know whether Sherman attributed the crime to the Confederate authorities.  Sherman could assure