CONFEDERATE ASSASSINATION OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mary_Surratt.jpg Mary Surratt was a a Confederate agent with a boarding house in Washington, D.C., at which a plot was hatched and carried out to assassinate Abraham Lincoln, President; Andrew Johnson, Vice President; and William Seward, Secretary of State, at the same time on April 14, 1865. They succeeded killing Lincoln; seriously injured Seward; and failed with Johnson outright. Historian William Wells Brown writes of his conspiracy in his 1867 masterpiece, THE NEGRO IN THE AMERICAN REBELLION, as follows: "On the 9th of the same month, Gen. Lee, with his whole army surrendered to Gen. Grant; and this fell the Southern Confederacy, the enemy of the negro and of Republican government. The people of the North, already tired of war, at once gave themselves up to rejoicing all over the free States. "But the time of merry-making was doomed to be short, for slavery, the cause of the Rebellion, was dying hard. The tyrants of the South, so long accustomed to rule, were now determined to ruin. Slavery must have its victim. If it could not conquer, it must at least die an honorable death; and nothing could give it more satisfaction than to commit some great crime in its last struggles. "Therefore the death of Abraham Lincoln by the hand of an assassin was but the work of slavery. It murdered Lovejoy at Alton, it slowly assassinated Tomey in a Maryland prison, it struck down Sumner in the Senate, it had taken the lives, by starvation , of hundreds at Anderson, Richmond, and Salisbury; why spare the great liberator?" P.325