On this day, 154 years ago, the 16th President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, was shot at Ford's Theatre in Washington, DC. One minute everyone was watching a play, the next minute the President was shot in the head. He died the following day.
But why was he assassinated, and who were the main players in the affair?
The President
Abraham Lincoln was President of the United States from March 4th, 1861 until his death on April 15th, 1865. He was the first Republican president and his victory was entirely due to his support in the North and West: he got no ballots at all in 10 out of 15 of the Southern slave states, and he won only two of 996 counties in all of the southern states.. This makes a lot of sense considering he is now most well-known as being the President who abolished slavery. He was the president through the entire Civil War (1861-1865).
He was the first president to be assassinated in US history. The assassination happened just five days after the Confederate army had surrendered and thereby ended the Civil War. The goal of the assassination was to revive the Confederate cause by eliminating the three most important members of the government: the President, the Vice President and the Secretary of State.
The Shooter
The shooter, John Wilkes Booth, was a Confederate sympathiser. He was a member of a famous family of actors, with his brother, Edwin Booth, being the country's 'leading' actor, just like their father. John Wilkes Booth himself was also a popular actor. He considered himself as a Southerner and passionately advocated for slavery. While he didn't fight in the Civil War, he stayed in the North where his hatred for Abraham Lincoln and the Union deepened.
He was part of a group of Confederalist supporters and conspirators in Washington, DC, where they in March 1865 planned to abduct Lincoln. However, that never happened. On the morning of April 14th, the day where the assassination took place, Booth had learned that the President would be at the performance of the comedy Our American Cousin that evening at Ford’s Theatre, a place he had performed at before.
Suddenly the plan was changed from kidnapping to assassination - and to include both the Vice President and the Secretary of State. the Secretary of State survived while the attack on the Vice President was never carried out.
The Assassination
Abraham Lincoln was watching the play in a private box with his wife and a few guest; a Union officer and his fiance. The box was pretty much unguarded, so Booth entered it and barred the door from the inside. As he knew the play well, he chose a time where he knew there would be a lot of laughter from the audience to burst through the inner door of the box. He then shot Lincoln in the back of his head and slashed the Union officer in the shoulder with a knife. He left the box by jumping down on the stage below, breaking his left leg in the fall. According to audience members, he shouted either "Sic semper tyrannis" ("Thus always to tyrants") and/or "The South is avenged!" or a variation of those before fleeing through a door at the side of the stage to where he had a horse waiting.
Meanwhile, Lincoln was attended by several doctors who had been in the audience. There was nothing they could do to save him, and he died in the morning of April 15th.
The Aftermath
The next day, the 16th of April, was Easter Sunday, and many sermons equated Lincoln's martyrdom with Jesus' sacrifice. An interesting thing to add is that historians have noted that Lincoln became much more popular in death than he had been in life, where many, even in the North, had deeply disliked him.
Hundreds of thousands watched his funeral procession on April 19th and even more people lined the 2,700 km route of the train that brought Lincoln's remains from Washington, DC. to his burial place in Illinois.
The search for Booth as well as his accomplices was the largest manhunt in American history to that date with a $100,000 reward for Booth - which is almost $1,5 milion dollars today!
After fleeing the theatre, Booth made it to Maryland where he met up with one of the other conspirators. After getting his leg treated by a doctor, he he hid for a few days aided by other Confederate sympathisers. During this time, he kept a diary where he wrote about his incredulity about how the people reacted to the shooting. He had expected to be a hero, but he was met with almost universal condemnation.
He only hid near the swamp for a while before fleeing further, but he was tracked down by federal troops on April 26th. His co-conspirator surrendered but Booth refused after which he was shot.
Afterwards, many associates of the people involved were arrested and interrogated, even the owner of Ford's theatre and the man who rented Booth the horse he used for escaping. Most were eventually released, but four were sentenced to death and were hanged on July 7th the same year.
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