“If it is [God's] will that I must die at the hand of an assassin, I must be resigned. I must do my duty as I see it, and leave the rest with God.”
—Abraham Lincoln, 1864
Abraham Lincoln was the first American president to be assassinated.
He was attacked by actor John Wilkes Booth, a Southern sympathizer, during
a performance at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C., on April 14,
1865. It was exactly five days after the end of the Civil War.
On April 14, 1865, President and Mrs. Lincoln went to Ford’s Theatre with Clara Harris and her fiancé, Henry Rathbone.
At 10:15, as the audience roared at the climactic line (“You sockdologizing old mantrap”), actor and Southern sympathizer John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln and severely wounded Rathbone with a knife. The attack was part of a plan to destroy influential members of the government.
Despite breaking a leg as he leaped onto the stage during
his getaway, Booth mounted a waiting horse and escaped into southern Maryland.
Lincoln, taken to a house across from the theater, died the next morning.
John Wilkes Booth believed he could improve chances for a separate Southern
nation if he assassinated the president, vice president, secretary of
state, and General Grant. He thought the resulting chaos would force the
North to accept a negotiated peace that would preserve the Confederacy.
Booth and at least nine other Southern sympathizers were
the subjects of an intensive manhunt. Booth was located on a southeastern
Virginia farm, where he died from self-inflicted wounds on April 26. The
others were tried in a military court. Four were hanged, four received
prison sentences (commuted by President Andrew Johnson in 1869), and one
was acquitted in 1867.