I hear of your being in motion by the 9th, and hope that the result may be all that you wish.
Tidings of the murder of the President have just come, and shocked every mind.

Can it be that such a resort finds root in any stratum of American opinion?
Evidently it has not been the act of one man, nor of a madman.

Who have prompted him?
I am grateful for your remembrance of my boy; the thought of him is ever nearest to my heart.

Generous, brave, and noble, as I ever knew him to be, that he should close his young life so early, even under the accepted conditions of a soldier's life, as a son of the Union, would have been grief sufficient for me to bear; but that his precious remains should have been so treated by the brutes into whose hands they fell, adds even to the bitterness of death.

I am now awaiting the hour when I can pay my last duties to his memory.
With my best and sincere wishes, my dear general, for your success and happiness, I am, most truly, your friend, J.A.