TODAY IN HISTORY|| US President Abraham Lincoln Shot

On the evening of April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth, a famous actor and Confederate sympathizer, assassinated President Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre 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.

Abraham Lincoln, byname Honest Abe, the Rail-Splitter, or the Great Emancipator, (born February 12, 1809, near Hodgenville, Kentucky, U.S.—died April 15, 1865, Washington, D.C.), 16th president of the United States (1861–65), who preserved the Union during the American Civil War and brought about the emancipation of enslaved people in the United States.

Who Was John Wilkes Booth?

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. Two weeks later, Richmond fell to Union forces, and on April 9, General Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox Court House.

Growing desperate, Booth came up with an even more sinister plan to save the Confederacy.

Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre

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.

He and his co-conspirators believed the simultaneous assassination of Lincoln, Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William H. Seward—the president and two of his possible successors—would throw the U.S. government into disarray.

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. Online.

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