President Abraham Lincoln is shot in the head at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C. The assassin, actor John Wilkes Booth, shouted, “Sic semper tyrannis! (Ever thus to tyrants!) The South is avenged,” as he jumped onto the stage and fled on horseback. Lincoln died the next morning.
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. 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.
READ MORE: 10 Things You May Not Know About the Lincoln Assassination
Booth was a well-regarded actor who was particularly loved in the South before the Civil War. During the war, he stayed in the North and became increasingly bitter when audiences weren’t as enamored of him as they were in Dixie. Along with friends Samuel Arnold, Michael O’Laughlin and John Surratt, Booth conspired to kidnap Lincoln and deliver him to the South.
On March 17, along with George Atzerodt, David Herold and Lewis Powell, the group met in a Washington bar to plot the abduction of the president three days later. However, when the president changed his plans, the scheme was scuttled. Shortly afterward, the South surrendered to the Union and the conspirators altered their plan. They decided to kill Lincoln, Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William Seward on the same evening.
When April 14 came around, Atzerodt backed out of his part to kill Johnson. Upset, Booth went to drink at a saloon near Ford’s Theatre. At about 10 p.m. he walked into the theater and up to the president’s box. Lincoln’s guard, John Parker, was not there because he had gotten bored with the play and left his post to get a beer. Booth easily slipped in and shot the president in the back of the head. The president’s friend, Major Rathbone, attempted to grab Booth but was slashed by Booth’s knife. Booth injured his leg badly when he jumped to the stage to escape, but he managed to hobble outside to his horse.
Meanwhile, Lewis Powell forced his way into William Seward’s house and stabbed the secretary of state several times before fleeing. Booth rode to Virginia with David Herold and stopped at the home of Dr. Samuel Mudd, who placed splints on Booth’s legs. They hid in a barn on Richard Garrett’s farm as thousands of Union troops combed the area looking for them. The other conspirators were captured, except for John Surratt, who fled to Canada.
When the troops finally caught up with Booth and Herold on April 26, they gave them the option of surrendering before the barn was burned down. Herold decided to surrender, but Booth remained in the barn as it went up in flames. Booth was then shot and killed in the burning barn by Corporal Boston Corbett. On July 7, George Atzerodt, Lewis Powell, David Herold, and John Surratt’s mother, Mary, were hanged in Washington. The execution of Mary Surratt is believed by some to have been a miscarriage of justice. Although there was proof of Surratt’s involvement in the original abduction conspiracy, it is clear that her deeds were minor compared to those of the others who were executed.
Her son John was eventually tracked down in Egypt and brought back to trial, but he managed, with the help of clever lawyers, to win an acquittal.
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Why isn’t this a National Holiday?
War criminal Abe Lincoln executed by Patriot JW Booth, on behalf of grieving Nation.
FIFY….
Arranged, staged, framed, set up, it makes no difference…
The tyrant was dead…
Amen and praise God!!!
Because too many folks are too busy being slaves to the government and completing their taxes before tomorrow.
Filing date was extended until May 17th .
My point was about the ironic juxtaposition of the normal date and this anniversary.
John Wilkes Booth:American Hero.
I wonder how many people know the truth about what Lincoln was really like. I think most people just think of him as the one that freed the slaves. The stories about the south and freedom sure are a lie. It didn’t take long for the bullshit from the WH and the media about history (in Lincoln’s time) and facts to be twisted from the truth.
I’m guessing in certain communities in the South maybe 50%, or more?
On Fornication Coast (both of them) close to zero.
Winners write history and as Napoleon said “history is agreed upon lies”.
The truth about Lincoln will never be told. I’ve read that he was not only gay/bisexual — he had a live-in even while in the White House, and it wasn’t Mary, either — but in very bad health (he most likely wouldn’t have lived through another term). He also was not assassinated by John Booth, it was all orchestrated.
Where did the alleged assassination take place? A THEATER. How do people miss that? John Wilkes Booth was a self-proclaimed actor! What really got my bullshit detector going, though, is how even today, hundreds of years after the event, no one’s really done much research on this story, and anyone who defies the narrative is sternly rebuked. Why would that happen, if it’s the truth? (We have a more recent example of this in JFK, another alleged bisexual who was “killed.”)
Did you know Walt Whitman gave a whole series of lectures on Lincoln’s death? Curious, that a poet would do such a thing. It’s all very flowery, as one might expect, but nonetheless still jibes with the standard narrative, that Booth killed Lincoln. But not a single bit of it is true, so Whitman was just being CNN 1879-style.
When you read the official story, it’s impossible to compare it to any logicality. Supposedly, Booth crept up behind Lincoln, shot him, then jumped over a balcony to a stage some 15 feet below (with a knife in hand), staggered, and then, while directly onstage, yells, “SIC SEMPER TYRANNUS!” and hobbles away. Read how preposterous that seems? Well let’s break it down with logic.
This all happened while our country was in a Civil War (whatever that is), right after a hotly-contested election, in a small theatre which is eminently defensible. Do you for a moment believe Secret Service wouldn’t have been on high alert and have the place locked up tighter than a turtle’s pecker? After reading the official story, my first thought was this. And there’s absolutely no way the SS botched this — situations like this are their whole raison d’etre. So it makes no sense that they would fail… unless it was an inside job. We’re supposed to believe the SS not only allowed Booth to get near the President’s balcony (unbelievable), he propped open the door into said balcony with a big stick (which the SS didn’t notice), then walked in, unnoticed of course, capped the Prez, got into a knife fight with Lincoln’s sitting guest Major Henry Rathbone (thus the knife), then jumped over a story down onto the stage below, again having enough time to stop and make a speech before running away.
This is 1865, people. The theatre is filled with soldiers and politicians who, I’m sure back then, had arms and knew how to use them; yet a little guy has just shot the President, jumped onto the stage, apparently wounding himself, is now surrounded by these no-doubt armed patrons (you know they had to at least have swords) — and he’s not only allowed to quote Julius Caesar, he’s allowed to run. Does this sound at all possible?
No. It doesn’t.
But they knew Lincoln was a dying man. He was also miscegenational. Studies made of his life and death masks, as well as photos, have revealed Lincoln probably had Multiple Mucosal Neuroma, a form of cancer, and most surely would have died before the end of his term; quotes from him around this time have him admitting he didn’t feel well. Plus, he had to deal with Grant’s 1864 spring election campaigns which turned into bloody stalemates and as Union casualties mounted, the lack of military success wore heavily on the President’s re-election prospects, and many Republicans across the country feared that Lincoln would be defeated. Sharing this fear, Lincoln wrote and signed a pledge that, if he should lose the election, he would still defeat the Confederacy before turning over the White House; this is why it was so important to get Andrew Jackson as Lincoln’s VP, he would help the Reconstruction since he was Tennesseean and therefore Southern (or so they believed).
I’m of the opinion they drew up a script that made Lincoln into a hero and a martyr and that scapegoated some Confederate sympathizer (Booth). These guys were masters of propaganda even then, and they knew how to turn a bad situation into a great one. It was brilliant, since Lincoln’s assassination is what cemented the Union cause, finalizing an end that was still somewhat in doubt. All the emotion created acted to bring the country—or at least the North—back together. After the assassination, there was a period of unity, and those behind the new President used that unity to promote the final points of the war, including the various indignities of Reconstruction.
Which of these stories do you believe has truth to them?
Thomas DiLorenzo has put out a couple of great books on this scumbag president.
Otherwise, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?
It was great right up until Abe complained of a splitting headache.
My usual response to things like this is that it is a shame someone didn’t kill Abe in his crib or well before he ever held political office. But was “honest” Abe an aberration, or simply a product of the America of the time? Would Hitler ever have been the Hitler we know (or what we have been told), had it not been for WW1, The Treaty of Versailles, and so much other western imperial bullshit? Was he really the horrible guy, or one who simply exploited the circumstances handed him by history, and power handed to him by his own people? Would there not have been another POS president, more than happy to walk all over the constitution and states’ rights, all to preserve the slave/master relationship between the north and the south? Not saying I’m not happy he was killed, but then again, if he had lived long enough to achieve the goals of the Colonization Movement and ship all the slaves back to Africa, would our nation not be 100% better off today? Or would it?
What a fine day that was. Bourbon will consumed in celebration this evening