1865
Lincoln Is Shot
On this day in 1865, John Wilkes Booth, an
actor and Confederate sympathizer, fatally shoots President Abraham Lincoln at
a play at Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C. The attack came only five days
after Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered his massive army at
Appomattox Court House, Virginia, effectively ending the American Civil War.
Booth, a Maryland native born in 1838, who
remained in the North during the war despite his Confederate sympathies,
initially plotted to capture President Lincoln and take him to Richmond, the
Confederate capital. However, on March 20, 1865, the day of the planned
kidnapping, the president failed to appear at the spot where Booth and his six
fellow conspirators lay in wait. Two weeks later, Richmond fell to Union
forces.
In April, with Confederate armies near
collapse across the South, Booth hatched a desperate plan to save the
Confederacy. Learning that Lincoln was to attend a performance of “Our American
Cousin” at Ford’s Theater on April 14, Booth masterminded the simultaneous
assassination of Lincoln, Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State
William H. Seward. By murdering the president and two of his possible
successors, Booth and his conspirators hoped to throw the U.S. government into
disarray.
On the evening of April 14, conspirator Lewis
T. Powell burst into Secretary of State Seward’s home, seriously wounding him
and three others, while George A. Atzerodt, assigned to Vice President Johnson,
lost his nerve and fled. Meanwhile, just after 10 p.m., Booth entered Lincoln’s
private theater box unnoticed and shot the president with a single bullet in
the back of his head. Slashing an army officer who rushed at him, Booth leapt
to the stage and shouted “Sic semper tyrannis! [Thus always to tyrants]–the
South is avenged!” Although Booth broke his leg jumping from Lincoln’s box, he
managed to escape Washington on horseback.
The president, mortally wounded, was carried
to a lodging house opposite Ford’s Theater. About 7:22 a.m. the next morning,
Lincoln, age 56, died–the first U.S. president to be assassinated. Booth,
pursued by the army and other secret forces, was finally cornered in a barn
near Bowling Green, Virginia, and died from a possibly self-inflicted bullet
wound as the barn was burned to the ground. Of the eight other people
eventually charged with the conspiracy, four were hanged and four were jailed.
Lincoln, the 16th U.S. president, was buried on May 4, 1865, in Springfield,
Illinois.