Assassination of Abraham Lincoln

Five days after the main Confederate army surrendered, President Abraham Lincoln was shot during a comedy at Ford's Theatre in Washington on the evening of 14 April 1865. His killer, the well-known actor and Confederate sympathiser John Wilkes Booth, was part of a wider plot that also targeted the vice-president and the secretary of state. Lincoln died the next morning, the first American president to be assassinated, and his death cast a long shadow over the end of the American Civil War and the rebuilding of the Union.

Booth, born in Maryland into a famous acting family, was an outspoken supporter of the South. He gathered a small band of conspirators, among them Lewis Powell, David Herold, George Atzerodt and John Surratt, with a plan to kidnap Lincoln and use him to force the Union to resume prisoner exchanges. An attempt on 17 March came to nothing when Lincoln changed his plans.

The Confederacy was by then collapsing. Richmond fell on 3 April, and on 9 April Robert E. Lee surrendered his army to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House. On 11 April Booth heard Lincoln speak in favour of voting rights for emancipated slaves and vowed it would be his last speech. He resolved to kill Lincoln, while Powell would murder Secretary of State William H. Seward and Atzerodt Vice President Andrew Johnson, hoping to throw the government into chaos and revive the Southern cause.

The Lincolns arrived late at the theatre to see the play Our American Cousin, with Major Henry Rathbone and his fiancée Clara Harris. The president's bodyguard was away from his post. At about 10:15 p.m., timing his move to a burst of audience laughter, Booth slipped into the presidential box, which he had barred behind him, and shot Lincoln in the back of the head with a small pistol. He slashed Rathbone with a knife, leapt awkwardly to the stage and shouted, by most accounts, "Sic semper tyrannis", the motto of Virginia. He escaped on a waiting horse.

Doctors found the wound to be mortal. The unconscious president was carried across the street to the house of a tailor, William Petersen, where he died at 7:22 a.m. on 15 April. Johnson was sworn in as president later that morning.

That same night Powell talked his way into Seward's house, where the secretary lay in bed recovering from a carriage accident. He clubbed Seward's son Frederick with his pistol after it misfired and stabbed Seward repeatedly in the face and neck; a splint on Seward's broken jaw may have saved his life. Atzerodt lost his nerve, got drunk and never approached Johnson.

Booth crossed into Maryland within half an hour, joined Herold, and had his broken leg set by a local doctor, Samuel Mudd. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton directed what became the largest manhunt in American history to that date. On 26 April soldiers trapped the pair in a barn on a Virginia tobacco farm. Herold surrendered; Booth was shot and died hours later.

A military commission tried eight defendants. Mary Surratt, Powell, Herold and Atzerodt were hanged on 7 July 1865, Mary Surratt becoming the first woman executed by the federal government. Mudd, Samuel Arnold and Michael O'Laughlen received life sentences and the stagehand Edmund Spangler six years; O'Laughlen died in prison, and Johnson pardoned the others in 1869. John Surratt fled abroad, was caught in Egypt in 1866 and freed after a civil jury failed to agree.

Lincoln was mourned in both North and South and around the world, with governments from Britain to China and Liberia sending condolences. After a funeral in Washington on 19 April, a train carried his body on a route of some 1,700 miles to Springfield, Illinois. Across the country he was mourned, by Frederick Douglass among many others, and Walt Whitman wrote "O Captain! My Captain!" in his memory. Lincoln's death made him a national martyr as the country entered the Reconstruction era under Johnson.

The assassination fell between our map years: the 1878 map shows the reunited United States that emerged from the war.