Lincoln is shot by John Wilkes Booth
On this day in 1865 John Wilkes Booth an actor and Confederate sympathizer fatally shoots President Abraham Lincoln at a play at Fords 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 Fords 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 Sewards 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 Lincolns 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 Lincolns box he managed to escape Washington on horseback.The president mortally wounded was carried to a lodging house opposite Fords Theater.About 722 a.m.
the next morning Lincoln age 56 diedthe 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.
