Assassination of Lincoln: a History of the Great Conspiracy: Trial of the Conspirators by a Military Commission, and a Review of the Trial of John H. SurrattHarris, T. M. (Thomas Mealey)
History
Assassination of Lincoln: a History of the Great Conspiracy: Trial of the Conspirators by a Military Commission, and a Review of the Trial of John H. Surratt
Harris, T. M. (Thomas Mealey)
Lincoln, Abraham, 1809-1865 -- Assassination; Surratt, John H. (John Harrison), 1844-1916
Mr. Merrick, however, seized the occasion to pass an eulogium on
that church, in which he showed as much disregard for the facts of
history as he did for the proven facts in this case. Perhaps he felt
this vindication to be called for from the fact that most of the
conspirators were Catholics in religion, and the further fact that
the friends who waited and watched for the return of his client to
Montreal after the assassination, and who, on his return, spirited
him away and kept him secreted for five months and then helped him
off to Italy, where he was found in the ranks of the Pope's army, and
who voluntarily came before the court on his trial to testify, and to
procure testimony in his behalf, were priests of that church. In his
eulogium on that church he forgot to mention the fact that the Pope
at an early period of the war acknowledged the Southern Confederacy
and wrote a sympathizing letter to Jefferson Davis, in which he called
him his dear son and denounced President Lincoln as a tyrant. He could
scarcely have forgotten that the Pope of Rome had sought to take
advantage of the arduous struggle in which our government was engaged
for the preservation of its life, to establish a Catholic Empire in
Mexico, and had sent Maximillian, a Catholic prince, to reign over
that, at that time, unhappy people, under the protection of the arms
of France, lent to the furtherance of his unholy purpose by the last
loyal son of the church that ever occupied a throne in Europe. Perhaps
he did not realize that it was God who frustrated that last grasp of
the drowning man at a straw that eluded his grasp, by preparing for
his holiness, the Pope, and for Louis Napoleon just at that moment the
Franco-Prussian war, which resulted in the final loss of his temporal
power to the Pope and with it his grip on the world, and of his empire
and crown to the last servile supporter of his temporal pretensions. To
claim for that church, as Mr. Merrick did, friendship to civil liberty,
respect for the rights of conscience and of private judgment, and love
for our republican institutions, is to ignore, or set at naught, all
the dogmas of that church on the above questions and all the claims of
the Papacy. Mr. Merrick manifestly thought that the attitude of the
Catholic clergy toward the assassination of the President could be
hidden from public view by his fulsome eulogy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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