Daily Inspiration Quote by Edwin M. Stanton

There is no poetry in Stanton's command, and that is the point. "Come here immediately" lands like a slammed door: urgent, clipped, managerial. It tells you what kind of man is speaking and what kind of moment this is. In the hours after Lincoln was shot, the country wasn't in a state of reflection; it was in a state of rupture. Stanton's sentence is crisis rhetoric stripped to its load-bearing beams.

The intent is operational, but the subtext is political. Stanton isn't asking for justice in the abstract; he's mobilizing state power in real time. The phrase "the murderer of the President" does two things at once. It names the crime in the largest possible terms and it frames the victim not as Abraham Lincoln, person, but as "the President", an institution. That move matters: it turns an assassination into an attack on governance itself, justifying an aggressive response and consolidating authority around the executive branch at its most vulnerable.

Context makes the line feel even colder. Stanton, Lincoln's Secretary of War and a formidable lawyer, effectively took control of the immediate aftermath in Washington. The legal mind shows in the phrasing: "find the murderer" isn't grief; it's a directive to identify, apprehend, and build a case, fast. The word "if" isn't doubt so much as bureaucratic habit, a thin veneer of procedure over panic. The brilliance is its refusal of sentiment; in a national emergency, sentiment is a luxury Stanton won't permit.