d ceased, were determined still to keep up that cowardly "fire in the
rear" which had been promised to the Rebel leaders by their Northern
henchmen and sympathizers.

The assassination of President Lincoln was but a part of the plot of
Booth and his murderous Rebel-sympathizing fellow conspirators. It was
their purpose also to kill Grant, and Seward, and other prominent
members of the Cabinet, simultaneously, in the wild hope that anarchy
might follow, and Treason find its opportunity. In this they almost
miraculously failed, although Seward was badly wounded by one of the
assassins.

That the Rebel authorities were cognizant of, and encouraged, this
dastardly plot, cannot be distinctly proven. But, while they naturally
would be likely, especially in the face of the storm of public
exasperation which it raised throughout the Union, to disavow all
knowledge of, or complicity in, the vengeful murder of President
Lincoln, and to destroy all evidences possible of any such guilty
knowledge or complicity, yet there will ever be a strong suspicion that
they were not innocent. From the time when it was first known that Mr.
Lincoln had been elected President, the air was full of threats that he
should not live to be inaugurated.

That the assassination, consummated in April, 1865, would
have taken place in February of 1861, had it not been for the timely
efforts of Lieutenant-General Scott, Brigadier-General Stone, Hon.
William H. Seward, Frederick W. Seward, Esq., and David S. Bookstaver of
the Metropolitan Police of New York--is abundantly shown by
Superintendent John A. Kennedy, in a letter of August 13, 1866, to be
found in vol. ii., of Lossing's "Civil War in America," pages 147-149,
containing also an extract from a letter of General Stone, in which the
latter--after mentioning that General Scott and himself considered it
"almost a certainty that Mr. Lincoln could not pass Baltimore alive by
the train on the day fixed"--proceeds to say: "I recommended that Mr.
Lincoln should be officially warned; and suggested that it would be
altogether best that he should take the train of that evening from
Philadelphia, and so reach Washington early the next day." * * *
General Scott, after asking me how the details could be arranged in so
short a time, and receiving my suggestion that Mr. Lincoln should be
advised quietly to take the evening train, and that it would do him no
harm to have the telegraph wires cut for a few hour