Sic Semper Tyrannis
THE late Matthew Arnold was jerked out of his Balliol superiority by the news that the President of the United States had been assassinated by an actor who had enough culture to announce his deed by shouting to the audience in Ford's Theatre, 'Sic semper tyrannis.' This apt quotation suggested to Mr. Arnold that American history was getting interesting. And ever since
that night of April 14, 1865, the assassination of President Lincoln has both horrified and fascinated the American public.
As movie critics put it, 'it had everything.' Although the Civil War was not formally over, it was over in fact. Lincoln's was almost the last of the six hundred thousand lives that the preserva- tion of the Union, 'the last, best hope of earth' as he had put it, cost. At the moment of his death, the Secretary of War, Stanton, had said, 'Now he belongs to the ages,' and Lincoln dead knew, at once, a universal acceptance of his greatness that he had never known in life, not even on the morrow of the surrender of Lec at Appomattox. Punch in London, the radical politicians in Washington, both made amends, and the politicians at once set about canonising the martyr, transferring his mana to the Republican Party and transforming his victory into something baser and less fruitful. Lincoln canonised had been murdered on Good Friday. He was at once compared to Christ (after all had not that maniac John Brown's execution been compared to the Crucifixion by no less eminent a prophet than Emerson?). The assassin was shot down; his alleged fellow-conspirators tried in one of the most disgraceful travesties of justice in American history. Whitman mourned the dead hero in a fitting elegy. 'Myths after Lincoln' began.
There might not seem to be much fresh to say on the tragic theme, if one eschews the bold conspiratorial theories of Dr. Eisenschiml, ingenious theories worthy of a Vyshinsky explaining a double or triple treason. In that theory, Stanton was the Beria of the affair and one is inclined to wish that it could be proved. But Mr. Bishop has not tried to invent new theories. He has given us an hour-to-hour account of that day in Washington and of the long death watch round the dying President across the street from the theatre the next morning. Although we know how it is to come out, the excitement is kept up to the end; the excite- ment bred by the knowledge of the great national disaster in the making; the excitement bred by the peripeteia of the conspiracy. It is hard to say who conies out worse, the conspirators or the 'security services' as we should put it today. Indeed, much of the drama comes from the interplay of one set of fools with another. And rightly, if uncritically, Mr. Bishop notes that in modern America, as in ancient Rome,
When beggars die, there are no comets seen : The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes. A few days before his death, Lincoln attended a performance of The Magic Flute. It was in German and so Lincoln may not have known that he was listening to a divine setting of the Second Inaugural:
In diesel; heirgen Hallen,
Kennt man die Roche nicht.
Dis aliter vistinz. Revenge, not love, was to be the order of the day. There were only too many Antonies to 'cry "Havoc!" and let slip the dogs of war' after a crime far more senseless than that murder of
. . . the noblest man That ever lived in the tide of times which Professor Mommsen so lamented.
D. W. BROGAN
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