were originally moved to become assassins by that sentiment which has
caused many other men to assail public characters, and sometimes with
the bloodiest success. This supposition does not exclude the action of
more eminent persons from the tragedy, who may have urged on those
hot-headed fools to the completion of their work. Booth was precisely
that sort of man who was likely to be the victim of the astounding
delusion that to kill President Lincoln would place him in history
alongside of those immortal tyrant-killers whose names are in most
people's mouths, and whose conduct is seldom condemned and very often is
warmly approved. There is constant praise going on of those who, in
classic times, put to death men who held, or who aspired to obtain,
improper power, or whose conduct was cruel. Booth thought that Mr.
Lincoln was a usurper, and that his conduct was cruel; and he could have
cited abundance of evidence from the speeches and writings of Northern
men, professing to be sound Unionists, in support of the position that
the President was a usurper and a tyrant. Having convinced himself that
such was the position, and character of the President, it was the most
natural thing in the world that he, a Southern man, and brought up on
those sensational tragedies in which human life is easily taken on all
occasions, should have jumped to the conclusion that it was his duty to
kill the man whose plan and actions he had so strangely misconceived.
If, while he was thus deluding himself with the notion that he was about
to rival Harmodius and Aristogeiton, and other Grecian foes of tyrants,
there came to him men who had too much sense to be deluded by such
nonsense, but who, nevertheless, were not above profiting, as they
regarded profit, from his folly, it is all but certain that he may have
had accomplices who have not yet been suspected, persons to whom
exposure would be a much greater punishment than death. Those old Greek
and Roman writers have much to answer for, as they have conferred a sort
of sanctity upon assassination, provided the victim be rightly selected;
and who is to decide whether he is so selected or not? If murderers are
to decide upon the deserts of their victims, there never was a murder
committed. Much of the literature that furnishes material for the
instruction of youth is devoted to the laudation of blood-shedding,
provided always the blood that is shed is that of a tyrant; and who to
say whether it is so or not? Why the tyrant-killer, to be sure. This is
an admirable arrangement for securing simplicity of proceedings, but it
admits of some doubt whether it can be quite approved on the score of
impartiality. When a man unites in his own person the characters of
accuser, judge, and executioner, it is within the limits of possibility
that he may be slightly untrustworthy. But in what is known as classical
literature, not only are tyrant-slayers allowed to have their own way
and say, but their action is upheld and defended by great geniuses who
never killed anybody with their own hands, but who had a marvellous
fondness for those whose hands were blood-stained. Cicero, for example,
is never tired of sounding the praises of eminent homicides. He scarcely
praised himself more than he eulogized illustrious murderers of other
days. And on his eloquent words in honor of assassination are the
"ingenuous youth" of Christian countries trained and taught. That some
of them should go astray under such teaching is nothing to wonder at.
This has happened in other countries, and why should it not happen here?
Assassination is not an American crime;[B] but it is not the less true
that Brutuses have been invoked in this country, and that more than once
President Jackson was pointed at as one from whose tyranny the country
might advantageously be relieved after "the high Roman fashion." One man
fired at him,--an Englishman, named Laurence, in 1834; but he proved to
be insane, and was treated as a mad man. Lieutenant Randolph, a
Virginian, assaulted President Jackson, but not with the view to
assassinate him. Brooks's assault on Senator Sumner was an assassin's
act, and a far more cowardly deed than that which Booth perpetrated,
though it had a less tragical termination. The assassinating spirit has
been increasing fast in the South, which is one proof of the growth of
the aristocratical sentiment there,--assassination being much more in
vogue among aristocrats than among monarchists or democrats, and most of
the renowned assassins and conspirators having been aristocrats. It
denotes the change in our condition that has been wrought by slavery and
civil war, that assassination should have been much talked of here, and
that at last the head of the Republic should have fallen before an
assassin's fire. In other countries assassination has often been
resorted to by parties and by individuals, but until very recently no
public man can be said to have been taken off by an assassin in America.
Booth and his associates stand alone in our history. Others may have
talked pistols and daggers, but it was left for them to use weapons so
odious for purposes of the same nature. Under the belief that the reader
may not be indisposed to see what has been done by assassins in other
countries, we shall here cite some remarkable instances of their deeds,
passing over classic antiquity and modern Italy.
In the sixteenth century assassination flourished to an extent never
before or since known: the hundred years that followed Luther's
appearance on the great stage forming murder's golden age, whether we
consider the number or the quality of the persons slain or conspired
against, or the sort of persons who condescended to act on the principle
that killing is no murder. Reformers and reactionists had their
assassins; but it must be acknowledged that the latter had the best
(which was the worst) of the game, so that nearly all the infamous names
that have come down to us won immortality in their service. It was a
great, a stirring time, one that was fertile in all manner of crimes,
and in which a gentleman that had much nerve and no scruples was sure of
constant and well-paid employment, and might make his fortune--or that
of his family, if he chanced to be cut off because he had cut down some
eminent personage whose life was a great inconvenience to this or that
sovereign or party. The conflict that was waged was one of opinion, and
therefore was fertile of fanatics, a class of men who have furnished a
large force of assassins, who have generally acted on principle, without
being always heedless of their interests. In the fierce struggle between
old ideas and new, every weapon was employed, and the talents and
dispositions of all kinds of men were made available by the great
managers who had the casting of the performers in the numerous tragedies
that were played. There was not a country in which assassination was
unknown; and in most countries it was common, kings and churchmen being
its patrons, and not unfrequently perishing by the very arts which under
their fostering care had been carried to the highest pitch of artistic
perfection. Philip II. was the most powerful monarch of those days. His
regal career began just as the Reformation was at its height, and when
the Reaction was about to begin. He was a sort of Christian Old Man of
the Mountain; and assassination was with him a regular business, a
portion of his mode of governing the many races that owned his sway.
Mignet, in his "Antonio Perez et Philippe II.," after mentioning that
Philip gave instructions to put Escovedo to death, says,--"This order
would appear strange on the part of the King, if we did not call to mind
the practices as well as the theories of that violent age, so fertile in
assassinations. Death was then the last argument of belief, the extreme,
but frequent means employed by parties, kings, and subjects. They were
not satisfied with killing; they believed they had the right. Certain
casuists attributed this right, some to princes, others to the people.
Here is what the friar Diego de Chaves, Philip's confessor, wrote upon
the very subject of Escovedo's death: 'According to my view of the laws,
the secular prince, who has power over the life of his inferiors or
subjects, even as he can deprive them of it for a just cause and by
judgment in form, may also do so without all this, since superfluous
forms and all judicial proceedings are no laws for him who may dispense
with them. It is, consequently, no crime on the part of a subject who by
a sovereign order has put another subject to death. We must believe that
the prince has given this order for a just cause, even as the law always
presumes that there is one in all the actions of the sovereign.'" When
such a king as Philip II. has such a ghostly father as Diego de Chaves,
assassination may become common. Escovedo was murdered; but there were
others besides the King concerned in his taking off, one of them being
the Princess of Eboli, widow of Philip's first favorite, Ruy Gomez de
Silva, and Antonio Perez; and it was because the King believed they had
tricked him in the business, that Perez fell, and, when in exile, had
his life sought by some of his old master's assassins. Two Irishmen were
authorized to kill him, by Philip's Governor of the Netherlands, but
failed, and were hanged in London. Baron de Pinella tried to kill Perez
at Paris, was detected, and executed. As he had been himself an active
assassin, Perez could not well complain of these attempts; but they
illustrate the theory and practice of the powerful Spanish monarch.
Perez was one of those persons who labored to bring about the
assassination of William (the Silent) of Orange. Writing to Escovedo,
who was Secretary to Don John of Austria, then in the Netherlands, Perez
observes,--"Let it never be absent from your mind that a good occasion
must be found for finishing Orange, since, besides the service which
will thus be rendered to our master, and to the States, it will be worth
something to ourselves"; to which highly moral injunction Escovedo
replied,--"You know that the finishing of Orange is very near my heart."
There is something almost comical in this correspondence, considering
its circumstances: Perez urging upon the man whom he was soon to
assassinate the duty of procuring the assassination of the Prince of
Orange, to whose party in Europe he was destined erelong to join
himself. Philip has been suspected of having procured the death of his
half-brother, Don John of Austria, by poison; but in this instance he is
entitled at least to the Scotch verdict of _Not proven_. He did bring
about the assassination of his ablest enemy, the Prince of Orange,
though not until after failures so numerous as would have served to
discourage a man of less persistent mind. Five unsuccessful attempts to
kill the Prince were made in two years; the sixth was successful, that
of Balthazar Gerard, who shot the Dutch deliverer on the 10th of July,
1584, in his house at Delft. Like Booth, Gerard used the pistol, a
weapon that seems to have been invented for the promotion of murder. He
made a determined effort to get off, and might have succeeded, had he
not stumbled over a heap of rubbish. To all these attacks on Orange some
of the most eminent Spanish statesmen and soldiers of that time were
parties, and Spain was then the premier nation. The Prince of Parma, one
of the foremost men of a period in which there was an absolute glut of
talent, spoke of Gerard's detestable crime as a "laudable and generous
deed," and strongly recommended that the reward which had been offered
for the Prince's murder should be conferred on his parents, a suggestion
with which Philip gladly complied. Those parents were made noble, and
were further rewarded by the grant of certain estates in Franche-Comte,
the property of their son's victim. This was to reverse the old saying,
"Happy is the child whose father goeth to the Devil!"--for the happiness
of the father was made by the child's taking the downward road. "At a
later day," says Motley, "when the unfortunate eldest son of Orange
returned from Spain, after twenty-seven years' absence, a changeling and
a Spaniard, the restoration of those very estates was offered to him by
Philip II., provided he would continue to pay a fixed proportion of
their rents to the family of his father's murderer. The education which
Philip William had received, under the King's auspices, had, however,
not entirely destroyed all his human feelings, and he rejected the
proposal with scorn. The estates remained with the Gerard family, and
the patents of nobility which they had received were used to justify
their exemption from certain taxes, until the union of Franche-Comte
with France, when a French governor tore the documents to pieces, and
trampled them under foot."
It would be tedious to mention all the assassinations with which Philip
II. was connected. He and his proconsuls and ambassadors were concerned
in many of the plots that were directed against the peace of countries
whose power was dreaded by Spain, or against the lives of their
sovereigns or other eminent personages. Elizabeth of England was to have
been served after the same fashion as Orange. Alva sent assassins to
take her off. Much of the assassination-work that was done in France
proceeded from Spain. The Massacre of St. Bartholomew was a Spanish
inspiration. In these days it would be called a _coup d'etat_. All
Philip's proceedings toward his enemies were characterized by the spirit
of assassination. The murder of Montigny is a strong case in point; and
the artful manner in which Egmont and Horn were inveigled into his toils
shows that he was a master-hand at conspiracy. Had there been two
Philips in Europe, one would have assassinated the other, and it would
have been dangerous to bet on the success of either.
France had her grand assassinations in the sixteenth century; and a
perfect crop they were, in which kings were conspirators or were
conspired against, killed or were killed, according to the supposed
requirements of state policy or the necessities of high-placed
individuals. At earlier dates assassination was far from being unknown
in France; and some remarkable cases occurred there in those awful times
when the Burgundian and Armagnac parties existed. The Duke of Orleans
was assassinated, and, later, the Duke of Burgundy. Louis XI., who had
rebelled against his father, is believed to have murdered his brother,
and also to have sought the death of Charles of Burgundy. But it was in
the sixteenth century that French assassinations were of the most
striking order. The marriage of Catharine de' Medici with that French
prince who became Henry II. is supposed to have been attended with the
effect of debauching French morals, as the Italians had a prodigiously
bad reputation as assassins, and particularly as poisoners. Catharine
was totally unscrupulous, having about as much of moral sense as goes to
the making of a tigress; but it needed not that she should marry into
the House of Valois to render assassination a Gallic crime. It would
have existed in France all the same, had she never been born. It was a
moral plague that ran over Europe, as the Black Death made the same tour
a couple of hundred years earlier. Poltrot killed Francis, Duke of
Guise, the greatest man of a great race. Henry, Duke of Guise, Francis's
son, was concerned in a plot to murder the Admiral Coligny, shortly
before the St. Bartholomew, and was one of the Admiral's murderers in
the Massacre. Henry of Guise was assassinated by Henry III., last of the
Valois kings of France, who took upon himself to act in accordance with
the principles laid down by Diego de Chaves, which James II. had acted
on in the case of the Black Douglas, and on which Ferdinand II., Emperor
of Germany, afterward acted toward Wallenstein, who was basely murdered.
Henry III. was soon made to follow his victim, being assassinated by
Jacques Clement, a Jacobin monk and a Leaguer. Henry IV. was killed by
Francois Ravaillac, a Romish fanatic, who was in bad odor with all
respectable Catholics who knew him. Richelieu lived in a condition not
unlike that which Cromwell knew, being often conspired against. Louis
XV. was attacked by Damiens, who was put to death by cruel tortures. In
the Revolution there were several assassins, the most noted of whom was
Charlotte Corday, praises of whom are so common as to weaken the force
of that feeling which should ever be directed against murder. Granted
that Marat was as bad as he is painted, no individual had the right to
slay him. Bonaparte was in great danger from assassins; and it was not
until he had the Duc d'Enghien assassinated that he obtained a respite
from their attacks, which were regarded with ill-disguised approbation
even by respectable persons who were his enemies or those of France. A
German youth endeavored to kill Napoleon in 1809, and was shot. In the
"Declaration" put forth by the Congress of Vienna against Napoleon,
after his return from Elba, the Emperor was deliberately delivered over
to assassins in the following terms: "Les Puissances declarent en
consequence, que Napoleon Bonaparte s'est place hors des relations
civiles et sociales, et que, comme ennemi et perturbateur du repos du
monde, il s'est livre a la vindicte publique." To the paper containing
this rascally sentence stands affixed the name of Wellington, who,
however, indignantly denied that he ever meant to authorize or to
suggest the assassination of Napoleon. No doubt his denial was honestly
made, but the legitimate construction of the words is favorable to the
opposite view. A French officer named Cantallon was charged with having
attempted to assassinate Wellington, and was tried and acquitted; and
Napoleon bequeathed ten thousand francs to Cantallon, which bequest was
paid after Napoleon III. became master of France, much to the
indignation of some Englishmen. The Duc de Berri, son of the Comte
d'Artois, (later Charles X.,) and the hope of the Bourbons, was killed
by Louvel, at the opera, in February, 1820; and his son, the present
Comte de Chambord, was born in the following autumn. Louis Philippe,
when King of the French, was so often attacked with fire-arms and
infernal-machines that one becomes dizzy in thinking of his escapes.
Napoleon III. has been in great peril from assassins. Orsini's attempt
to kill was a terrible piece of butchery, causing the death or
mutilation of many persons, resembling in that respect the result of
Fieschi's attempt to murder Louis Philippe. Had Orsini's attempt proved
as successful as Booth's, it is probable that there never would have
been a Secession War in this country. The Rebels counted much on
European intervention, as they supposed that France and England would
act together in their behalf; and had the Emperor been killed in 1858,
the "cordial understanding" between the great nations of Western Europe
would have come to an end, and perhaps they would have gone to war. The
state of foreign affairs in 1860 had much more to do with bringing on
our civil war than appears on the surface of things.