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 hours, he directed me to
seek Mr. W. H. Seward, to whom he wrote a few lines, which he handed to
me. It was already ten o'clock, and when I reached Mr. Seward's house
he had left; I followed him to the Capitol, but did not succeed in
finding him until after 12 M. I handed him the General's note; he
listened attentively to what I said, and asked me to write down my