Papers Relating to Foreign Affairs, Accompanying the Annual Message of the President to the Second Session Thirty-eighth Congress, Part IV, Appendix to diplomatic correspondence of 1865; the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, late president of the United States of America, and the attempted assassination of William H. Seward, Secretary of State, and Frederick W. Seward, Assistant Secretary, on the evening of the 14th of April, 1865; expressions of condolence and sympathy inspired by these events

Inhabitants of Barrhead

Barrhead, Renfrewshire, May 4, 1865

This address was adopted at a banquet held to congratulate the American government on the suppression of the slaveholders’ rebellion.

Barrhead, Renfrewshire, May 4, 1865.

Dear Sir: We cannot express the grief and horror which filled our hearts at the tidings of President Lincoln’s death. But who shall say that a crime less atrocious than the murder of that great and good man, who, in the eyes of the world, stood, by character and position, the most prominent representation and champion, in the history of this or any other age, of the cause of personal and national freedom, would have befitted the death, desperation of southern slavery? In the light of this, its last and culminating sin, which has at length revealed its infamous depths as a treason against all that is sacred to humanity and shocked the world, we bless God for the men and the measures which have swept that accursed institution away for ever.

We congratulate your government and people on the suppression of this gigantic rebellion, and the successful assertion of your indissoluble unity as a nation, results fraught with incalculably blissful interest to every other nation, and especially to the sons of toil everywhere throughout the whole earth.

And while we would turn with tenderest sympathy to the sad, bereaved ones in your midst, from the home first desolated by this fearful struggle to that of your lamented President, and would seek to mingle our sorrow with theirs, and while we would weep for the innocent sufferers whose natural protectors have fallen in a bad cause, we cannot but hail the dawning of a future for your country infinitely more glorious than its past, and rejoice in it, not for your sake alone but for our own, and for the cause of liberty and labor in all time coming.

Signed at a social meeting assembled for the purpose.

• JOSEPH M. NAB.
• ALEXANDER JOHNSTON.
• ROBERT PATRICK.
• JOHN McDERMOTT.
• THOMAS PATRICK.
• WILLIAM PATRICK.
• MATTHEW CRAIG.
• WILLIAM CRAIG.
• ANDREW CRAIG.
• JAMES BAILEY.
  And fifty other names.

Hon. Charles Francis Adams.