Lincoln had been “naturally anti-slavery” since his youth, and it had been the issue that made him leave the law and re-enter politics in 1854. It was the Civil War that turned Lincoln into an outright abolitionist. His 1862 Emancipation Proclamation used his wartime powers to free all slaves in the rebel states. Bringing black support and enlisting soldiers for the Union cause, it was a decision as politically justifiable as it was morally sound. For Lincoln it was a triumph: “I never, in my life,” he said, “felt more certain that I was doing right, than I do in signing this paper.” Anxious to prevent a peacetime revocation of his emergency decree, Lincoln secured in 1865 the Thirteenth Amendment that enshrined in America’s Constitution the freedom of all its people.
Shot in the back of the head by the southern radical John Wilkes Booth as he attended the theater with his wife Mary on April 14, 1865, Lincoln became America’s first president to be assassinated in office. Some confusion surrounds the words spoken by John Stanton, the secretary of war, as Lincoln breathed his last. But truly Lincoln belongs both “to the angels” and “to the ages.”
JACK THE RIPPER
Active 1888–1891
Lord Cranbrook, Cabinet minister, October 2, 1888
Jack the Ripper stalked the dingiest areas of Victorian London, preying on the most vulnerable and ostracized members of society: prostitutes. In a frenzied bout of blood lust, he murdered at least five women from August to November 1888. The Ripper, also known as the Whitechapel murderer or the leather apron, remains the most infamous murderer never to be caught and the first serial killer to achieve an international profile. “Horror ran through the land,” reads one account from the period. “Men spoke of it with bated breath, and pale-lipped women shuddered as they read the dreadful details.”
All of the Ripper’s murders took place in or around the poverty-stricken Whitechapel area of east London. His victims were street prostitutes. Although they were not raped, in nearly every case their throat was cut and lower torso mutilated in such a way as to suggest a depraved sexual motive for the murder and an obsession with wombs. Such was the precision with which the bodies were maimed that police felt the killer must have had at least some knowledge of either anatomy or butchery.
On August 7, 1888, Martha Tabram was stabbed thirty-nine times in the stairwell of a block of apartments in Whitechapel, and left with her lower body exposed. Whether the Ripper was responsible is disputed, but he was unquestionably behind the murder of Mary Ann Nichols, found in a cobbled alleyway in Whitechapel on August 31, strangled and then repeatedly stabbed in the throat, stomach and genitalia. Detective Inspectors Frederick George Abberline, Henry Moore and Walter Andrews were brought in to assist local inquiries (later supplemented by the City police under Detective Inspector James McWilliam) and separate suspects were questioned concerning both murders, but nothing came of their investigations. Then, on September 8, a pattern began to emerge, as the body of Annie Chapman was found in Spitalfields, with her throat cut and some of her organs ripped from her body.
The killer clearly thrived on the fear he was creating. On September 30, after killing his next victim, Elizabeth Stride, outside the International Working Men’s Club in Dutfield’s Yard, he boldly walked eastward to Aldgate, probably passing the police patrols that were passing every fifteen minutes, where he accosted Catherine Eddowes near a warehouse. Just discharged from a local police station for being intoxicated, she was found lying on her back with her throat cut, stomach opened and organs removed. The last victim of the Ripper was Mary Jane Kelly, another local prostitute, murdered in her room in Spitalfields and chopped into tiny pieces on November 9.
On September 27, midway through the killings, the Central News Agency received a poorly written confession, in red ink, signed “Jack the Ripper.” Although this may have been a hoax, on October 16 a local committee set up to keep vigil in the area was sent what appeared to be half a human kidney, apparently from one of the murder victims. As news of a serial killer stalking the streets appeared in the press, so fear escalated into hysteria, and the London police commissioner, Sir Charles Warren, was forced to resign.
