Assassination of Abraham Lincoln – World History

Table of Contents

BACKGROUND

John Wilkes Booth was a Maryland native born in 1838 into a family of noted actors. Booth would eventually take the stage himself, appearing in 1855 in Shakespeare’s Richard III in Baltimore.
Despite his Confederate sympathies, Booth remained in the North during the Civil War, pursuing a successful career as an actor.
But as the war entered its final stages, he and several associates hatched a plot to kidnap the president and take him to Richmond, the Confederate capital.

On March 20, 1865, the day of the planned kidnapping, Abraham Lincoln failed to appear at the spot where Booth and his six fellow conspirators lay in wait, foiling their planned abduction.
Booth came up with an even more sinister plan to save the Confederacy.
Learning that Lincoln was to attend Laura Keene’s acclaimed performance of “Our American Cousin” at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C., on April 14, Booth masterminded a plan even more diabolical than kidnapping.

The Lincolns arrived late for the comedy, but the president was reportedly in a fine mood and laughed heartily during the production.
Lincoln occupied a private box above the stage with his wife Mary Todd Lincoln, a young army officer named Henry Rathbone and Rathbone’s fiancé, Clara Harris, the daughter of New York Senator Ira Harris.
At 10:15, Booth slipped into the box and fired his .44- caliber single-shot derringer pistol into the back of Lincoln’s head. After stabbing Rathbone, who immediately rushed at him, in the shoulder, Booth leapt onto the stage and shouted, “Sic semper tyrannis!” (“Thus ever to tyrants!”–the Virginia state motto).

At first, the crowd interpreted the unfolding drama as part of the production, but a scream from the first lady told them otherwise.
Although Booth broke his leg in the fall, he managed to leave the theater and escape from Washington on horseback.
A 23-year-old doctor named Charles Leale was in the audience and hastened to the presidential box immediately upon hearing the shot and Mary Lincoln’s scream. He found the president slumped in his chair, paralyzed and struggling to breathe.

Several soldiers carried Lincoln to a boardinghouse across the street and placed him on a bed. When the surgeon general arrived at the house, he concluded that Lincoln could not be saved and would probably die during the night.
Finally, Lincoln was pronounced dead at 7:22 a.m. on April 15, 1865, at the age of 56.
News of the president’s death traveled quickly, and by the end of the day flags across the country flew at halfmast, businesses were closed and people who had recently rejoiced at the end of the Civil War now reeled from Lincoln’s shocking assassination.

As the nation mourned, Union soldiers were hot on the trail of John Wilkes Booth, who many in the audience had immediately recognized. After fleeing the capital, he and an accomplice, David Herold, made their way across the Anacostia River and headed toward southern Maryland.
They then sought refuge from Thomas A. Jones, a Confederate agent, before securing a boat to row across the Potomac to Virginia.
On April 26, Union troops surrounded the Virginia barn where Booth and Herold were hiding out and set fire to it, hoping to flush the fugitives out. Herold surrendered but Booth remained inside. As the blaze intensified, a sergeant shot Booth in the neck.
Four of Booth’s co-conspirators were convicted for their part in the assassination and executed by hanging on July 7, 1865. They included David Herold and Mary Surratt, the first woman put to death by the federal government.