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.
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John Wilkes Booth,American hero.
Was a war of succession,not a civil war.
One wonders how different the nation might be had HE died in infancy instead of his brother Thomas. But then one has to remember that he was a product of the nation at the time (just like Bush, Obama, and Trump). The stage for the war for southern independence and constitutional secession had been laid easily a decade before, by the Whigs, who were nothing more than the philosophical descendants of the crony-capitalist Federalists that imposed British-style mercantilism on the nation at its founding. That the Republicans came along with another crony capitalism supporter like Lincoln was surely no accident, and the chances that some other supporter of northern manufacturers, the railroads, and high oppressive tariffs would have come along, were likely very high.
Who knew that . . . “Four-score and 7 years ago, our forefathers . . . gave to the states all powers not expressly given by the constitution to the federal government, but now the time comes for the federal government to take all powers from the states, and bend over if you do not like it.”*
*not a direct quote
And where is Stucky, btw?
more like “and you will all die if you don’t like it.”
Sorry for the 6th grade joke: Why was Lincoln like a woman? Cause he was ‘shot in the box’.
BOMBSHELL: CNN Investigation into Lincoln Assassination Proves Russian Collusion
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“Got him right between the ears! Quick! Bring in the patsy!”
Death to tyrants.