Page:Life of Abraham Lincoln - Bowers - 1922.djvu/58

 56 would practice law again. To his wife this unnatural joy was portentous—she remembered that he had been like this just before little Willie died. In the evening they went to Ford's Theatre. Stanton tried to dissuade them because the secret service had heard rumors of assassination. Because Stanton insisted on a guard Major Rathbone was along. At 9 o'clock the party entered the President's box—the President was very happy—at 10:20 a shot was heard—Major Rathbone sprang to grapple with the assassin and was slashed with a dagger. The assassin fell as he sprang from the box to the stage, where he brandished his bloody dagger, yelled with terrible theatricalism, "sic semper tyrannis," and stalking lamely from the platform disappeared in the darkness and rode away. The President was unconscious from the first, and as they bore him from the theatre a lodger from a house across the street said "Take him up to my room," where he lay unconscious until next morning when he ceased to breathe; and Stanton at his bedside said, "Now he belongs to the Ages."

Someone had recognized the assassin as John Wilkes Booth, an actor, a fanatic in the Southern cause. And in killing Lincoln he did his people of the South the greatest possible harm.

The North had been decorated with celebration of victory; now it was bowed and dazed with grief and rage. Those that had abused him and maligned him and opposed him now came to understand him as in a new light