[Scraps for Youth] “The Conspirators” (from The Youth’s Companion, July 6, 1865; p. 106)

President Lincoln was murdered on the 14th of April; and in a few days his murderer, John Wilkes Booth, a noted actor, was shot, when refusing to surrender. A little later, Booth’s accomplices were put on trial, at Washington, before a court martial. They consist of Harrold, Payne, (whose real name is Powell,) Atzerot, O’Laughlin, Spangler, Dr. Mudd and Mrs. Surratt.

The trials are drawing to a close, and the disposition that is to be made of the accused, most of whom are unquestionably guilty, will soon be known. Had Booth been taken alive, and put on trial, we should probably have known more of the murderous plot than now we are likely ever to know. The real motives of Booth must remain buried in his grave. Political feeling, of course, was one of the motives that prompted him, perhaps the principal one. But though he was a secessionist, secessionism did not necessarily make him a murderer. He had been nursed, brought up, and educated, as a play actor, on a peculiar description of literature, which makes light of the highest obligations, and which is in an especial manner disregardful of the sanctity of human life. The tragic branch of dramatic literature is recklessly loose on the topic of bloodshed. From the Elizabethan age till now,—embracing the three centuries that include pretty much the entire period of the modern drama,—tragedy and murder have been made to mean much the same thing. Even Shakspeare’s tragedies, which are universally held to be the highest efforts of human genius, are “drenched with gore and cumbered with the slain” to an extent that would suffice for the most sensational of current sensation novels.

It was on this sort of literature that Booth was trained, until his moral sense was entirely perverted; and the occurrence of the secession war gave him an opportunity to imitate the action of some of his favorite heroes, men who show about as much tenderness for human life as terriers show for the lives of rats. His heated brain made him to see in the mild, and humane, and unselfish Lincoln, one of those savage tyrants of whom he had often ranted and canted on the mimic stage; and he aspired to the fame of the tyrant-slayer, and, no doubt, thought his name would become as famous as that of the most noted king-killer of antiquity. He felt that the blow he should strike would make him immortal. It commended itself to him as something transcendently sensational, and probably he made no effort to resist the diabolic temptation. The result was a coup de theatre quite unparalleled in the history of crime, and such as the stage, aided as it is by ten generations of poets, can present nothing to rival.

Booth was a wretched ruffian, and his crime was the effect of his training. Let the young, then, avoid the paths he trod. With one or two exceptions, his associates and tools are miserable creatures. They belong to the class of “loose fishes,” fellows who are the offspring of that vicious state of society which must exist wherever slavery has an existence, or wherever it is upheld and admired. It has been well said that slavery killed President Lincoln. Nowhere out of slave society could such a gang have been brought together. Spawned by slavery, they have borne themselves in a manner that accords strictly with their parentage. Their crime has no gilding whatever. It stands before the world in all its naked, hideous, perfect depravity. No false sentiment will ever be able to cast a halo over their deed, to which there is nothing similar in the dark pages of crime.