[From the Caledonian Mercury, Edinburgh, Thursday, April 27, 1865.]
“god moves in a mysterious way.”
It is with a profoundly solemn sense of the inscrutable wonder-workings of Providence that we announce to-day the assassination of President Lincoln. The news is harrowing in the extreme. It has struck Edinburgh, and will strike Great Britain and the world, with terrible impressiveness. It has come [Page 365] so unexpectedly, so unsuspectingly also, at the very time when the friends of the United States were rejoicing over the extinction of the great rebellion, and when even the opponents of the President and his government were reconciling themselves to fate and contemplating the immediate and peaceful winding up of the four years, war. It is no mere figure of speech, nor is it the slightest exaggeration, to say that when the telegraph first wafted the brief announcement through this city
Nay, more, not a few strong men wept as children, or as if a common father had gone. Among all classes—chiefly, of course, among the friends of the North—there was evidenced a feeling of astonishment, grief, and pain, which could not have been greater had the sovereign of our realm been taken to her last home. For ourselves, knowing as our readers do the intense admiration we have ever had of the calm, Christian, enlightened statesmanship of “honest old Abe,” his firm and inflexible determination to abide by the Constitution of his country, and at the same time to blot out, through that Constitution, the infamous system and institutions of slavery, we feel bound to say that we have not language equal to the expression of our sorrow. President Lincoln was, in our judgment, “the right man in the right place”—the appropriately chosen ruler of a great people. He was admirably adapted for the arduous work Providence gave him to perform; and that he thoroughly performed that work during his first term of office no one can deny. Those who take the most comprehensive view of the magnitude of the struggle in which the federal government was involved, and of the conflicting interests to be consulted in that struggle, are most impressed when they reflect how he raised army after army and fleet after fleet; how he equipped and supported them; how he met, through sanitary commissions and Christian commissions, every requirement, temporal and spiritual, of which they stood in need; and how, pari passu with all this, he smoothed down the rough angles of old prejudices, curbed the impetuous demands of wild and revengeful passions, and led the people on from victory to victory to the goal of universal and unconditional emancipation. Like Moses, he saw the people in bondage; like Moses, he sympathized with them in their afflictions; like Moses, he led them through the Bed sea out of the reach of their oppressors; and, like Moses also, just as he was beginning to realize a Pisgah view of the promised inheritance he is taken away. There are and there will be many who in no irreverential spirit and with no idea of improperly associating the human with the divine will feel and say, in something like the same language as did the disciples on their way to Emmaus, “We had thought that it would have been he who would have redeemed Israel.” It has no doubt been the earnest wish of tens of thousands of British hearts, as well as tens of thousands and millions of others in the States and throughout the world, that he would be spared to complete the work he so nobly and so chivalrously begun; that he would see the consolidation and regeneration of his country after its four years’ terrible baptism of blood; that he would long rule over a united, a happy, and a prosperous people, all the happier and all the more prosperous that both divisions of them had tested each other’s courage and skill, and that in the ordeal the original ground of quarrel had completely disappeared. The Great Disposer of events has ordered it otherwise. He has allowed, no doubt for His own wise and excellent purposes, as He allowed the rebellion itself to break out, President Lincoln to fall—to fall, too, by an assassin’s hand. Is it not mysterious? Is it not confounding? Is it not another illustration of the solemn truth that “His thoughts are not as man’s thoughts, nor His ways as man’s ways?” We cannot do otherwise than bow to that Sovereignty whose wisdom is infinite, whose judgments are as the floods, whose hand no earthly power is able to restrain, and to whom no creature he has formed can or ought repiningly to say, “What doest thou?”
[Page 366]In view of the terrible calamity involved in the death of President Lincoln, and the circumstances connected with it, the first question likely to arise is “what effect will it have on the future of the war, or on the probability of an early and satisfactory peace?” To this we believe we can give an answer which the future will demonstrate to be correct. The war will be proceeded with, and the work of reconstruction will go on as certainly, as surely, and as successfully as if the calamity itself had not occurred. The American people readily accommodate themselves to circumstances—adverse as well as favorable—and while they will mourn with sincerest sorrow the loss of one so eminently sagacious and good, they will also prosecute to its early and satisfactory completion the work he so faithfully and firmly showed them how to perform. Vice-President Johnson has already assumed the reins of office. He is a tried man, a more thorough abolitionist even than President Lincoln himself, and one also who will abate neither jot nor tittle of the national demands. Notwithstanding his unfortunate appearance at the occasion of his inauguration, he is believed in and trusted by the American people. He has done much good service to the state in his day; he has displayed a firmness and fearlessness against the slaveholding faction which has endeared him to the thoroughgoing emancipationists of both north and south; and while he will want the suave manner and genial temperament and long-sighted perspicacity of “honest old Abe,” he has other qualities which not less fit him to be the wise and powerful ruler of the destinies of a great nation passing like refined gold out of a furnace of fire. We have no doubt he will rise to the dignity of his position and the responsibilities of his office, and that, carrying out the typical idea to which we have given expression, he will perfect, like Joshua with the judges, what Moses was not permitted to perform. Rulers die; nations live; God reigns. This is our comfort and consolation in the midst of sudden calamities, overwhelming the spirit and drowning the soul in grief, and this is especially our consolation in the contemplation of the awful end of the father of a regenerated people.
We do not and we will not discuss at present—because we have no certain information on the subject—the circumstances originating the assassination of President Lincoln. It may have been the result of a southern conspiracy—assassination being a crime almost unknown in the north, and unfortunately too well known in the south—or it may have been the work of a madman. The former seems to us much more likely, especially when the attempt on Mr. Seward the same night, and in his suffering chamber, is taken into account. We prefer, however, to await details and proofs. It is to be regretted that the genial, confiding, honest old man should have exposed himself unprotected at a time when “southern chivalry “must have been writhing under its terrible defeat. If it turn out that his death has been the result of a plot on the part of the southern leaders, then, need we say, it will be atoned for by a sweeping revenge.