Stockton Herald, South Durham and Cleveland Advertiser. — 1865-05-05 (Stockton-on-Tees, Cleveland, England)

STOCKTON HERAID, FRIDAY, MAY STH, 1865. ,  AMERICAN  AFF Al RS.  May 11 2 3 I  Tiil position is becoming more complicated asi events rapidly turn up in this dreadfully convulsed country. Battles, victories and surrenders, triumphs and rejoicings, yield for a. time to poignant sorrow over the untimely fall of Columbia's greatest man. A nation is 'plunged into deepest grief from the highest point of its gladness. One day it is exuberant in the idea that it has crushed a rebellion, and the next struck dumb under the Consciousness of the assassination of its leading spirit. Abraham Lincoln, the ex-railsplitter, boatman, and boxer, raised by a certain party of politicians for a certain purpose to be head of the state, has passed away, struck down by the hand of a murderer, and has left his country plunged iii the horrors of a dreadful strife, which he called into existence, but could not quell. He has gone to his final account, and has much to answer for in the million of wholesale murders of which he was the cause, and the many thousand rapes, robberies, and buntings which he connived at in the fiendish conduct of Butler, Sherman, &c., ;ma their followers. The Yankees can gloat over the devastated plains of the fair and fruitful South and the bloody battle tiehls where their brethren have been slaughtered wholesale ; they think lightly of the holocaust that has been offered to the vain ambition of their idol President ; but when he is struck downin the mids 4 of their hero-worship, they are maddened with grief and rage. "(Mc murder makes a villain, millions a hero; Whole nations fall to sate the lust of power." The man who dealt the blow to their idol is desicJutted a murderer, while the victim, who dealt out ribald jests in a slaughter field, and called for a comic song amidst the dying and dead, is regarded as a hero, a saint, and a martyr. But, "1k mortals nil nisi honunt."—let the dead rest in peace, whatever may be the result of their life actions. Abraham Lincoln has had his defenders, though the whole world deplore the dreadful and bloody policy he had instituted, and the blood of millions cries from the ground for vengeance upon the destroyer. His fall will be a great misfortune both to the Federals and Confederates. To the former it is likely to entail a continuance of the war, and to the latter it may prove the inauguration of a series of murders and cruelties dealt out in cold blood. The late President was tired of the war, and was glad to see the pr,,spect of peace, which he was willing to promote with mildness and clemency as a conqueror. He was denied the opportunity, and the bloody mantle he was desirous of casting away has fallen upon his successor, who declares himself a Monster in the following words— "Hang them all! Hang them twenty times over !!" His successor, Andy, Johnson, President, journeyman tailor, and a drunkard, has declared his intention to treat the Confederates "as traitors ought to be treated." Here is a man who, till he was married, could neither read nor write; who emerged from the low pot-house as a rowdy demagogue; who in his drunken orgies denounced vengeance upon the South, and was put forward by the rabid republicans as a check upon the democratic party, whose wish was for peace ; raised unexpectedly and unintentionally into great power to sway the destinies of 30,000,000 of people ; who, when the oath of office was administered to him, was so helplessly drunk that he could not repeat the oath, disgusted his own countrymen and the ambassadors of other nations, who witnessed the scene with something like shame and horror. What can be expected from such a man? But he fills a position which Mr John Bright would have us to believe is superior to the throne of England. Alas! for the South. The tender mercies of such a man will