“IMPORTANT: ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT LINCOLN,” read the headline, and below that, “SECRETARY SEWARD DAGGERED IN HIS BED.” Here was Rodney Dorman’s moment of triumphal vengeance. Good riddance to them, he crowed, presuming that Seward hadn’t survived, for both men were “nuisances to the earth,” and “a thousand deaths each could not atone for their cruelty, crimes & wickedness.” A Union soldier in the city’s occupying forces surmised that local Confederates were “making merry,” even if they remained silent in public, and no doubt Dorman confined his sentiments to the pages of his diary. There he relished the news, grateful to both God and the assassin. Whoever the killer was, he was “a great public benefactor.”1 The next evening came further confirmation via another vessel (with no contradiction of Seward’s demise), fanning Dorman’s glee, alongside his ever-present ire. How glorious that neither man could any longer “exult & gloat over the South, & the ruin & devastation they have caused,”
