For myself I shall never put my foot on a soil from which flaunts the hated Stars and Stripes....

I am sick, sick at heart[1289]." The news of Lee's surrender arrived at the same moment with that of a serious injury to Seward in a runaway accident, and in its editorial on the end of the war the _Times_ took occasion to pay a tribute to the statesman whom it had been accustomed to berate.
"There seems to be on the part of President Lincoln a desire to conciliate vanquished fellow-citizens.

Under the guidance of Mr.Seward, who has creditably distinguished himself in the Cabinet by his moderate counsels, and whose life will, we trust, be spared at this crisis to the Union, he may by gentle measures restore tranquillity, and perhaps, before his term of office expires, calm in some degree the animosities which have been raised by these years of war[1290]." Nor was this insincere, for Seward had, first in the estimate of British statesmen, more slowly in the press and with the public, come to be regarded in an aspect far different from that with which he was generally viewed in 1861.

There was real anxiety at the reports of Seward's accident, but when, in less than a week, there was received also the news of the assassination of Lincoln and of the brutal attack on Seward, all England united in expressions of sympathy and horror.
"Few events of the present century," wrote Adams, "have created such general consternation and indignation[1291]." In Ford's Theatre on the evening of April 14, Lincoln was shot by Booth, a fanatical Southerner, who had gained entrance to the box where the President was sitting.

Lincoln died early the next morning.