The life, crime, and capture of John Wilkes Booth,: with a full sketch of the conspiracy of which he was the leader, and the pursuit, trial and execution of his accomplices./ By George Alfred Townsend.

XA Solusm. of as ac.
unimpalpable, invible, nondescript, condemned to that worse than dame
tion,-annihilation The river.ottom may ooze about It laden with
great shot and drowning manacles. The earth may have opened to give it
that silence and forgiveness which man will never give its memory. The
fishes may swim around it, or the daisies grow white above it; but we
shall never know. Mysterious, incomprehensible, unattainable, like the
dim times through which we live and think upon as if we only dreamed
them in perturbed fever, the assassin of a nation's head rests somewhere
in the elements, and that is all; but if the indignant seas or the profaned
turf shall ever vomit his corpse from their recesses, and it receive humane
or Christian burial from some who do not recognize it, let the last words
those decaying lips ever uttered be carved above them with a dagger, to
tell the history of a young and once promising lif -selk! elet!
LETTER V.
A SOLUTION OF THE CONSPIOY.
The annexed Letter, which has been cavillcd at, as much as oopled,'i a rationale''
the Conspiracy, combined from the Government's own officers. When it was writte n h
was believed to be true: the evidence at the trial has confirmed much of it: I reprint it
to show how mem's ingenuities were at work to account for the oonoeption and progress
of the Plot.]
WAsariTov, May 2.
Justice and fame are equally and simultaneously satisfied. The President is not yet in his sarcophagus, but all the conspirators against his life,
with a minor exception or two, are in their prison cells waiting for thel
halter.
The dark and bloody plot against a good ruler's life is now so fully un
raveled that I may make it plain to you. There is nothing to be gained
by further waiting; the trials are proceeding; the evidence is mountain
high. Within a week the national scaffold will have done its work, and
be laid away forever.' This prompt and necessary justice will signal the
last public assassination in America. Borgia, and Medici, and BrinvilUiers,
lhave left no descendants on this side of the world.
The conspiracy was both the greatest and the smallest of our cycle.
Narrowed in execution to a few, it was understood and connived at by a
multitude. Ofie man was its head and heart; its accessories were so Gus
merous that the trouble is not whom to suspect, but whom not accuse.
Damning as the result must be to the character of our race, it must be
admaitted, in the light of facts, that Americans are as secretive and as
skillful plotters as any people in the world. The Rye House plot, never
tully understood; the many schemes of Mazzini, never fastened upon him
sufficiently well for implication, yield in extent, darkness'and intricacy, to
the republican plot against the President's life and those of his coun'selors.
The police operations prove that the late murder,as not a spasmodio
and fitful crime, but long premeditated, and carried to consummation with
as much cohesion and resolution as the murder of Allossandro de Media
or Henri Quatre.
I have been accused of cannonizing Booth. Much as I denounce and de.
Irecate his crime-holding him to be worthy of all execration, and so
-.eped in blood that the excuses of a eentiry will fiail to lift him out of
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