President Lincoln is shot

April 14, 1865

At Ford's Theater in Washington, D.C., John Wilkes Booth, an actor and
Confederate sympathizer, fatally wounds President Abraham Lincoln. The attack
came only five days after Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered his
massive army at Appomattox, effectively ending the American Civil War.
Booth,
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
Laura Keene's acclaimed performance in Our American Cousin at Ford's Theater on
April 14, Booth plotted 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 a paralyzing 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 jumped to the stage and shouted "Sic semper
tyrannis! [Thus always to tyrants]--the South is avenged!" Although Booth had
broken his left leg jumping from Lincoln's box, he succeeded in escaping
Washington.
The president, mortally wounded, was carried to a cheap lodging
house opposite Ford's Theater. About 7:22 a.m. the next morning, he died--the
first U.S. president to be assassinated. Booth, pursued by the army and secret
service 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 persons eventually charged with the conspiracy, four
were hanged and four were jailed.