DCA Ward 41798 PREFACE. FROM the hour the author stood by the dead face of Abraham Lincoln, in the Executive Mansion at Washington, he has had the idea of writing a romance upon the conspiracy of Booth. Like many such literary projects nursed by a journalist, this one had not only to be postponed, but finally to become a portion of a broader story, because too many of the actors in the tragedy still lived, and the mere crime presented no elevated moral to justify its embellishment. Considering it, however, as one of a series of cumulative acts of violence committed upon or from the soil of Maryland during the conflict of Emancipation, the author felt not only an epic propriety to be in the theme, but it appealed to him as a descendant of Marylanders and one who had already, in his romance of "The Entailed Hat," pictured the twin lobe of Maryland and the rise of the slave interest. The temptation to paint the more picturesque Western Shore, from the old Catholic tide-water counties and the metropolitan life of Washington and Baltimore to the German valleys and the mountain battle-fields, was not to be dismissed, either by the sacrifice it would require, or from the delicacy of a generation still alive. Experimenting with the subject, the author found such rapid changes taking place in all this region, in thought as well as in things, that he believed it would be next to impossible in twenty years more for any one to realize the soci ety which came first into national notice when Booth made his hegira through it. Besides, the author's stock of materials, made complete by visits and searches of nineteen years, required the interpretation of his own eye and hand. He felt that, while to have written this book earlier would have been to speak too harshly and too narrowly of some agents in the crime, to postpone the composition longer would have been to remand it to mere antiquarian literature and lose the missionary use and the heartiness of adventure; for, when he knew Booth personally and saw his associates executed, the author was turning into twenty-five, and, when he unraveled the skein of Booth's concealment and flight after the crime, the author was turning forty-four years. Voters had grown up in the interim who had been but tottling babes when the mighty war ceased with this sacrificial mass, and the President's death ended the wild Maryland epic, of which the raid of John Brown, the Baltimore riots, Antietam battle, and the spy system in the old Potomac counties were elements. Enough of all this was yet undiscovered to leave space for fancy to enliven the athletic game, and in one or two cases characters have been wholly invented, or rather made out of general types and conditions, to replace others not proper to be copied. The author not only lived contemporary with the personages of his book, but he was an active traveler and sightseer with and among them. No natural scene is sketched in this book that did not dwell upon his sight, and he trusts that the impassioned scenes of action have been tinted in subordination to a national and human philosophy. GAPLAND, MD., 1886. |