Abraham Lincoln - American Memory

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government, faithful found among the faithless of his own State,
clinging to the falling pillars of the republic when others had fled,
he must be murdered; and because the Secretary of War had taken
care, by the faithful discharge of his duties, that the republic
should live and not die, he must be murdered. Inasmuch as these
two faithful officers were not also assassinated, assuming that the
Secretary of State was mortally wounded, Davis could not conceal his
disappointment and chagrin that the work was not " well done, 7 ' that
"the job was not complete ! "
Thus it appears by the testimony that the proposition made to
Davis was to kill and murder the deadliest enemies of the confederacy—
not to kidnap them, as is now pretended here ; that by the declaration
of Sanders, Tucker, Thompson, Clay, Cleary, Harper and Young, the
conspirators in Canada, the agreement and combination among them
was to kill and murder Abraham Lincoln, William H. Seward, Andrew
Johnson, Ulysses S. Grant, Edwin M. Stanton, and others of his ad-
visors, and not to kidnap them ; it appears from every utterance of
John Wilkes Booth, as well as from the Charles Selby letter, of which
mention will presently be made, that, as early as November, the
proposition with him was to kill and murder, not to kidnap.
Since the first examination of Conover, who testified, as the court
will remember, to many important facts against these conspirators
and agents of Davis in Canada—among others, the terrible and fiend-
ish plot disclosed by Thompson, Pallen, and others, that they had as-
certained the volume of water in the reservoir supplying New York
city, estimated the quantity of poison required to render it deadly,
and intended thus to poison a whole city—Conover returned to Can-
ada, by direction of this court, for the purpose of obtaining certain
documentary evidence. There, about the 9th of June, he met Bev-
erley Tucker, Sanders, and other conspirators, and conversed with
them. Tucker declared that Secretary Stanton, whom he denounced
as "a scoundrel," and Judge Holt, whom he called "a bloodthirsty
villain," "could protect themselves as long as they remained in
office by a guard, but that would not always be the case, and, by the
Eternal, he had a large account to settle with them." After this,
the evidence of Conover here having been published, these parties
called upon him and asked him whether he had been to Washington,
and had testified before this court. Conover denied it; they insisted,
and took him to a room, where, with drawn pistols, they compelled
him to consent to make an affidavit that he had been falsely person-
ated here by another, and that he would make that affidavit before a
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