The trial of those implicated in the assassination of Lincoln gave a name to be remembered in the annals of American women, though the record be of the saddest. That Mrs. Surratt was legally guilty of complicity in the murder of the martyred president is at least doubtful; it may even be questioned if she were guilty of foreseeing the crime, her part in the conspiracy most probably ending with the plan of abduction which was the forerunner of the murder. None the less, she suffered a shameful death, the passions of the time being too strong for the cooler voice of justice to be heard; and again was enacted, in minor form, the national drama that followed upon the insurrection of John Brown. The women of the South, if they did not go to the lengths of their Northern sisters on the former occasion, looked upon Mrs. Surratt in the light of a martyr to their lost cause, and so expressed themselves with a bitterness and forgetfulness of the true nature of the case which was a denial of their best attributes as women; and the Northern woman, holding Mrs. Surratt to be a very devil of malignity and criminality, could not patiently hear her name spoken with aught but horror and detestation. So the war ended, as it began, in misunderstanding, and, therefore, the bitterest of hatred between the two sections of a land which was at the end of the struggle no more united than at the beginning.
It is pleasant to turn from these manifestations of all that was worst in American womanhood to the consideration of woman's social conditions at the time of the expiration of the war. Even during the period of strife there had been uplifted a new voice from the women of our land, though as yet that voice was too feeble and too drowned in the clash of battle to attract much attention. One of the expressions of this new spirit which had arisen in at least a portion of our women is worthy of note as being in some sense a pioneer. In 1864 there was issued a book called _Woman and Her Era_, by Eliza W. Farnham. The object of the author was to demonstrate the superiority of women over men: not superiority in comparative sense or even for certain ends, but absolute and unimpeachable. The leading argument of the book, as it appeared in syllogistic form and in all its wonders of capital letters, was as follows: "Life is exalted in proportion to the Organic and Functional Complexity; Woman's Organism is more Complex and her Totality of Function larger than those of any other being inhabiting our earth; Therefore her position in the Scale of Life is the most exalted--the Sovereign one." The minor proposition was supported by arguments which belong to the lecture room of the anatomist. Passing in silence over that which the lady calls the "Organic Argument," a little of that which she terms the "Religious Argument,--wherefore, is not clear,--may be quoted with a view to entertainment if not to profit: