Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States, was assassinated by well-known stage actor John Wilkes Booth on April 14, 1865. Shot in the head as he watched the play, Lincoln died the following day at 7: 22am, in the Petersen House opposite the theater. He was the first U.S. president to be assassinated, with his funeral and burial marking an extended period of national mourning.
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Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States, was assassinated by well-known stage actor John Wilkes Booth on April 14, 1865. Shot in the head as he watched the play, Lincoln died the following day at 7: 22 am, in the Petersen House opposite the theater. He was the first U.S. president to be assassinated, with his funeral and burial marking an extended period of national mourning. Occurring near the end of the American Civil War, the assassination was part of a larger conspiracy intended by Booth to revive the Confederate cause. After a dramatic initial escape, Booth was killed at the climax of a 12-day manhunt. Conspirators Lewis Powell and David Herold were assigned to kill Secretary of State William H. Seward, and George Atzerodt was tasked with killing Vice President Andrew Johnson. Beyond Lincoln’s death, the plot failed: Seward was only wounded and Johnson’s would-be attacker lost his nerve. After the assassination, actor Frank Mordaunt wrote that Lincoln, who apparently harbored no suspicions about Booth, admired the actor and had repeatedly invited him to visit the White House. There are various theories about Booth’s motivations. In a letter to his mother, he wrote of his desire to avenge the South. In any event, Powell refused to shoot Booth for fear of the crowd and was either unwilling or unwilling to personally make an attempt on the president’s life. Booth attended Lincoln’s second inauguration on March 4, 1865, writing in his diary afterwards: \”What an excellent chance I had, if I wished, to kill the President on Inauguration day!\”: 174,437n17: 25.
On April 11, Booth attended the speech in which Lincoln promoted voting rights for blacks; Booth said that that is the last speech he will ever give… That was Lincoln’s last speech. Whether Booth urged Lewis Powell to shoot Lincoln on the spot because he was not armed and considered himself a better shot than himself is not exactly known because he considered Powell to be better than Booth. Booth’s sister believes Booth greatly admired the abolitionist John Brown, the grandest man of the 20th century. David S. Reynolds believes Booth was inspired by John Brown as saying: ‘John Brown was inspired, theGrandest. Man of the century!’ Booth was later hanged for his roles in the conspiracy. The four conspirators who were later hanged were John Surratt, Michael O’Laughlen, Lewis Powell, and John SurRatt. Booth was also an outspoken Confederate sympathizer; in late 1860 he was initiated in the pro-Confederate Knights of the Golden Circle in Baltimore. In March 1864, Ulysses S. Grant, commander of the Union armies, suspended the exchange of prisoners of war with the Confederate Army to increase pressure on the manpower-starved South. The Confederate President Jefferson Davis and other Confederate officials had fled. But Booth continued to believe in the Confederatecause and sought a way to salvage it.
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This page is based on the article Assassination of Abraham Lincoln published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 09, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
