Benjamnin F. Butler, Butler's Book: Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences of Major-General Benjamin Butler

Shortly before six o'clock, however, as he was returning from his drive, he was thrown from his carriage by his horses becoming frightened and running away, and was so seriously injured that his life was despaired of. He lay on his sick-bed until the 14th of April, when Lincoln was assassinated, and he himself was so brutally assaulted that he was detained in bed for many weeks afterwards.

Meantime, Mr. Lincoln had gone to City Point and remained absent several days, returning only to meet the assassin's pistol.

On the night of the 14th of April, I took the train at Washington for New York, and in the morning met in the train the newspapers announcing the assassination. On the night of April 16 I returned to Washington in order to be present to give aly assistance in this crisis of the country.

I remained in Washington for some time in conference with Mr, Stanton, who was the moving spirit of that day, and with President Johnson. Previous to this time I had had no special relation with Johnson, but the fact that his oft-repeated declarations upon taking the presidential office, that the Rebellion must be subjugated, and the traitors must take back seats, were in the line of my own thought, brought me into conference with him. I believed those were his true views of the situation and that he thought the Rebellion ought to end, as it should have, in subjugation, so that all the Confederate State governments should be wiped out as well as the Confederate government. The governments of those States were part and parcel of the Confederacy and should, in my view, have been entirely obliterated. I thought enough of the army should be retained to provide a stable military government for the South until the white men should be taught what loyalty to the Union was, and I believed that the negroes should be taught what their position as citizens was before the right of suffrage should be accorded to them. I advised and so urged that the States in rebellion should be divided into territories held under military control for a sufficient length of time to teach them that the lost cause and the lost Confederation was utterly obliterated and to be forgotten. I advised that those territories should be given specific names. For instance, Virginia should be the territory of Potomac; North Carolina, the territory of Cape