THE ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT LINCOLN.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XVIII, Issue 6213, 15 October 1881, Page 6

THE ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT LINCOLN.

[From " Stud!e3 of Assassination." By Wlrt Sikos.] Abraham Lincoln had often been -warned against the danger of assassination. To heed these warnings was, however, a thing impossible to him—first, because he could not believe in the verity of such a danger to himself—second, because it is out of the question to throw the shield of protection around an American President, accessible to everybody as he is and must ever be. But a great conspiarcy had long been hatching. A plot whose incipient steps were taken long before, under circumstances and with purposes widely different from those which now existed, came forth in this hour and wrought its woe. The original conspiracy was merely a plot for the abduction of the President, but as time went on and tho scheme grew in likelihood of execution it grew also in dimensions and audacity. At last it aimed at no : smaller result than the assassination of all the most prominent officials of the Government, and General Grant besides. Of the nine persons who are known to have been concerned with Wilkes Booth, directly or indirectly in the plot, four were hung (one of these a woman), three sentenceO to hard labour for life on the Dry Tortugas, and one for six years. That the Confederate Government had anything to do with this truly hellish scheme, no one for a moment supposes. It was the hare-brain enterprise of fools and madmen. Wilkes Booth was pursued into Maryland and Virginia. He had broken his leg in springing from the box to the stage in the theatre, but a horse had been provided for him, and he had got away. In Maryland a doctor had set his broken leg, and then he had resumed his flight, accompanied by what dark phantoms of terror none can ever know. When he was overtaken by the pursuing party he had hidden himself in a farmer's barn near Bowling Green, Va., and there, refusing to give himself up, he was shot to death among the littering straw. Some comparisons have been made between Booth and other noted assassins, He wa.= not probably the greatest criminal of the conspiring nine ; but his vanity was colossal. Through this vanity, in my opinion, he was wrought upon to the horrible end he reached. By the accident of a strolling life which caused his parents to be sojourning in the South when he was born, Wilkes Booth was a Southerner. Of this fact he was proud, as all Southerners are, with reason or without. His sympathies were with the South in the war, and his associations were with those who, sharing that sympathy, flattered his vanity and made it seem to him that his bold and bloody act would make him live in histoiy for evermore as a grandly heroic personage. He was a weak man —in no sense a strong character- and his vices were those of a weak nature, of which vanity is chief. Stronger minds would sway him easily to their will. In appearance he was romantic and striking, and his profession was that of one who interprets uoble and romantic characters ; but a more emphatically commonplace person in himself than Wilkes Booth I never chanced to meet. As an actor, though his aspect was picturesque, his talent was mediocre. My memory has always persisted in recalling him in the shape I last beheld him, a few months before the assassination, standing up at the public bar of a drinking saloon, through whose wide-open doors any passer-by in the street could see him, drinking a glass of toddy with the spoon against his cheek. It is charitable to believe that his mind was touched by insanity, if only by the transient insanity of drink, when he committed the deed which has stained with infamy a name made honourable by others of his race. For the sake of these others, living and dead, comment is content to pass briefly by the dramatic maniac who slew Abraham Lincoln.