Two months later came the terrible event which plunged the nation, and especially the Booth family, into such awful sorrow. Edwin was playing in Boston, but at once gave up his engagement and returned to his home in New York. Numbers of the most eminent people hastened to assure him of their sympathy and their belief in his loyalty. He had indeed been stanch for the Union, and the only vote he ever cast was for Lincoln in 1864. But he was overwhelmed by this fresh misfortune, this new cloud that had settled on his house. His brother Junius and his brother-in-law were thrown into prison in Washington, and he felt himself an object of suspicion. I had returned to the field, and was in Richmond when the news reached me. I wrote to him at once, but my letter was withheld. All letters to him for awhile were kept back, and I suppose especially any from Richmond. I could not leave my post immediately, and it was a month or more before I reached New York, where I went, of course, direct to him. The first shock was over, but the old gloom was greater than ever. He told me he had seen nothing in his brother to excite suspicion, and I have always believed that the awful act was the result of a disturbed brain. It was so theatrical in plan and performance; the conspiracy, the dagger, the selection of a theatre, the brandishing of the weapon, the cry "_Sic Semper Tyrannis_" to the audience--all was exactly what a madman brought up in a theatre might have been expected to conceive; a man, too, of this peculiar family, the son of Junius Brutus Booth, used all his life to acting tragedies. He had not only nursed me tenderly, a soldier wounded for the cause he should have hated, but in all the exciting period of the riot he said no word that indicated sympathy with the South. He went out daily to inquire the news, and was indignant at the outrages he reported; he even assisted to shield my negro servant who remained hidden in the cellar for nearly a week. Two months before the end of the war he wished me well when I set out to rejoin Grant.