The news of the death of President Lincoln, received at first with utter incredulity, deepened the gloom and horrible uncertainty in which we lived. That he was dead simply may not have excited any regret among people who for four years had been learning to regard him as the prime agent in all our troubles. But when the time, place, and manner of his death came to be told, an unaffected and deep horror and dismay filled our minds. The time has not yet come for Southern people to estimate President Lincoln fairly. We never could admire him as he appeared as a candidate for the Presidency, nor look upon him as a great man, in any sense of the word. But even if we had recognized him as a lofty and commanding genius, fit to guide the destiny of a great nation through a crisis of imminent peril, the smoke of the battle-fields would have obscured to us all his good qualities, and we should have regarded him only as the malignant star, whose ascendency boded nothing but evil to us. He was always presented to us in caricature. The Southern press never mentioned him but with some added _sobriquet_ of contempt and hatred. His simplicity of character and kindliness of heart we knew nothing of; nor would many now at the South, much as they may deplore his death, concede to him the possession of any such virtues. They judged him by the party which took possession of him after his inauguration, and by his advisers. But a sense of remorse fills my mind now as I write of him, realizing how much that was really good and guileless, and well-intentioned and generous, may have come to an untimely end in the atrocious tragedy at Ford's Theatre. The extravagance of eulogy by which the Northern people have sought to express their sense of his worth and of his loss, has had much to do with our unwillingness to judge him fairly. To place the Illinois lawyer by the side of Washington would have been an offense against taste and common-sense; but to compare him to the SON OF GOD, to ascribe to him also the work of "dying the just for the unjust," is an impious indecency which may suit the latitude of Mr. Bancroft, and the overstrained tone of the Northern mind generally, but whose only effect at the South is to widen the distance between us and the day when we shall frankly endeavor to understand and do justice to President Lincoln. CHAPTER XIV. GENERAL STONEMAN--OUTRAGES--COLD-BLOODED MURDERS--GENERAL GILLAM--PROGRESS THROUGH LENOIR, WILKES, SURRY, AND STOKES--STONEMAN'S DETOUR INTO VIRGINIA--THE DEFENSE OF SALISBURY--THE FIGHT IN THE STREETS OF SALISBURY--GENERAL POLK'S FAMILY--TEMPORARY OCCUPANCY OF SALISBURY--CONTINUOUS RAIDING.