What would you like to read?Search books, authors, genres, shelves, users...
Search books, authors, genres, shelves, users...Search books, authors, genres, shelves, users...
What would you like to read?Search books, authors, genres, shelves, users...
Search books, authors, genres, shelves, users...Search books, authors, genres, shelves, users...
5 books
George Alfred Townsend (January 30, 1841 – April 15, 1914) was an American journalist and novelist who worked under the pen name Gath. He was one of the youngest war correspondents during the American Civil War. Over the course of his career he worked for multiple newspapers including the Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Press, New York Herald, New York World and Chicago Tribune. He became well known as Washington D.C. correspondent for the New York World and his coverage of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. He turned his daily reports into a book, The Life, Crime, and Capture of John Wilkes Booth, published in 1865. In 1871, he established and edited the Washington D.C. newspaper the Capital along with Donn Piatt, but left the venture soon after its creation. He built an estate on South Mountain near Burkittsville, Maryland, and named it Gapland. He built the National War Correspondents Memorial on his estate to recognize journalists who died in war. After his death, his estate was purchased by the State of Maryland and became Gathland State Park.
Last night, the 27th of April, a small row boat received the carcass of the murderer; two men were in it, they carried the body off into the darkness, and out of that darkness it will never return…. In the darkness, like his great crime, may it remain forever, impalpable, invisible, nondescript, condemned to that worse than damnation,—annihilation. The river-bottom may ooze about it laden with great shot and drowning manacles. The earth may have opened to give it that silence and forgiveness which man will never give its memory. The fishes may swim around it, or the daisies grow white above it; but we shall never know. Mysterious, incomprehensible, unattainable, like the dim times through which we live and think upon as if we only dreamed them in perturbed fever, the assassin of a nation’s head rests somewhere in the elements, and that is all; but if the indignant seas or the profaned turf shall ever vomit his corpse from their recesses, and it receive humane or Christian burial from some who do not recognize it, let the last words those decaying lips ever uttered be carved above them with a dagger, to tell the history of a young and once promising life—USELESS! USELESS!
Last night, the 27th of April, a small row boat received the carcass of the murderer; two men were in it, they carried the body off into the darkness, and out of that darkness it will never return…. In the darkness, like his great crime, may it remain forever, impalpable, invisible, nondescript, condemned to that worse than damnation,—annihilation. The river-bottom may ooze about it laden with great shot and drowning manacles. The earth may have opened to give it that silence and forgiveness which man will never give its memory. The fishes may swim around it, or the daisies grow white above it; but we shall never know. Mysterious, incomprehensible, unattainable, like the dim times through which we live and think upon as if we only dreamed them in perturbed fever, the assassin of a nation’s head rests somewhere in the elements, and that is all; but if the indignant seas or the profaned turf shall ever vomit his corpse from their recesses, and it receive humane or Christian burial from some who do not recognize it, let the last words those decaying lips ever uttered be carved above them with a dagger, to tell the history of a young and once promising life—USELESS! USELESS!
