The Lincoln Assassination

The Lincoln Assassination The Civil War had not been going well for the Confederate States of America for some time. John Wilkes Booth, a well know Maryland actor, was upset by this because he was a Confederate sympathizer. He gathered a group of friends and hatched a devious plan as early as March 1865, while staying at the boarding house of a woman named Mary Surratt. Upon the group 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 revised his mastermind plan. However it still included the simultaneous assassination of Lincoln, Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William H. Seward. By murdering the President and two of his possible successors, Booth and his co-conspirators hoped to throw the U.S. government into disarray. John Wilkes Booth had acted in several performances at Ford’s Theatre. He knew the layout of the theatre and the backstage exits. Booth was the ideal assassin in this location. Vice President Andrew Johnson was at a local hotel that night and Secretary of State William Seward was at home, ill and recovering from an injury. Both locations had been scouted and the plan was ready to be put into action. Lincoln occupied a private box above the stage with his wife Mary; a young army officer named Henry Rathbone; and Rathbone’s fiancé, Clara Harris, the daughter of a New York Senator. The Lincolns arrived late for the comedy, but the President was reportedly in a fine mood and laughed heartily during the production. At 10:15, Lincoln’s guard stepped away and Booth slipped into the box and fired his .44-caliber single-shot derringer into the back of Lincoln’s head. After stabbing Rathbone, who immediately rushed at him, Booth leapt onto the stage and shouted, “Sic semper tyrannis!” (“Thus ever to tyrants!”–the Virginia state motto). At first, the crowd interpreted the unfolding drama as part of the production, but a scream from the first lady told them otherwise. Although Booth broke his leg in the fall, he managed to leave the theater and escape from Washington D.C. on horseback. His knowledge of the theatre layout proved useful in his escape. A 23-year-old doctor named Charles Leale was in the audience and hastened to the presidential box immediately upon hearing the shot and Mary Lincoln’s scream. He found the President slumped in his chair, paralyzed and struggling to breathe. Several soldiers carried Lincoln to a house across the street and placed him on a bed. When the surgeon general arrived at the house, he concluded that Lincoln could not be saved and would die during the night. Vice President Andrew Johnson, members of Lincoln’s cabinet and several of the President’s closest friends stood vigil by Lincoln’s bedside until he was officially pronounced dead at 7:22 a.m. on April 15th. The first lady lay on a bed in an adjoining room with her eldest son Robert at her side, overwhelmed with shock and grief. Earlier that night, around 10:30 pm on April 14, one of Booth’s fellow conspirators, Lewis Powell, entered the home of Secretary of State William Seward. He was let in under the ruse that he was a local doctor and there to care for his patient. Seward had been injured in a carriage accident days before, and suffered a concussion, broken jaw, and a broken right arm. As he walked upstairs and into his room, Seward’s son Fredrick noticed him. After Fredrick ordered him to stop, Powell darted into the Secretary’s room and proceeded to stab Seward several times in the face and neck. After a hand to hand fight with Seward’s son, Powell rushes out of the house and is later arrested back at Mary Surratt’s boarding house. Seward is left in his bed bleeding and scarred, but survives partially because of the neck brace his is wearing. The third part of the plot involved the Vice President. Andrew Johnson was staying at a nearby hotel. On that morning, George Atzerodt booked room 126 at that same hotel. However, he could not muster the courage to kill Johnson, so he began drinking at the hotel bar as early as 8 pm to calm his nerves. He presumably got drunk, and spent the night wandering drunk around the streets of Washington. Later that night, Johnson awoke and was informed of Lincoln’s shooting. He went to be by the President’s side, unknown to him that his own life was in jeopardy earlier that evening. During his stay at the hotel, Atzerodt had asked the bartender about Johnson's whereabouts. This aroused suspicion the next day, after Lincoln was assassinated. An employee of the hotel contacted the police regarding a "suspicious looking man in a gray coat.” He was later apprehended and arrested. By 4 am, the early hours of April 15, 1865, while Lincoln was barely holding on to life, Booth, now traveling with friend David Herold, arrives at Dr. Samuel Mudd’s house. Mudd, an acquaintance of Booth’s, was there to set Booth’s broken leg. Whether or not Mudd knew what Booth had just done remains a question for historians. By 6 pm that night, with his leg set, Booth and Herold push on towards the Potomac River. They plan to cross into Virginia and find a safe haven with sympathetic southerners. Booth is shocked to learn that southerners aren’t sympathetic at all. Most are mourning what they saw as the callous murder of a great intellectual mind. It takes until April 24th for the two men to secure a boat to row across the Potomac to Virginia. This slows the men’s pace and put them behind schedule. On April 18th, Lincoln’s body was carried to the Capitol rotunda to lay in state while people paid their respects in a national funeral. On April 21st, Lincoln’s body was boarded onto a train that brought it to Springfield, Illinois, where he had lived before becoming President. Tens of thousands of Americans lined the railroad route and saluted their fallen leader during the train’s solemn progression through the North. The train stopped for funerals in Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, Buffalo, Cleveland, and Chicago. He was finally laid to rest in his tomb on May 4th 1865. On April 26, Union troops surrounded the Virginia farmhouse where Booth and Herold were hiding out and set fire to it, hoping to flush the fugitives out. Herold surrendered but Booth remained inside. As the blaze intensified, a sergeant shot Booth in the neck, allegedly because the assassin had raised his gun as if to shoot. Carried out of the building alive, he lingered for three hours before gazing at his hands and uttering his last words: “Useless, useless.” Eight defendants stood trial for President Lincoln's murder on May 12, 1865. Four were found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging. The remaining four (including Samuel Mudd) were ordered to serve prison sentences at the remote Fort Jefferson, in the Dry Tortugas off of Florida, a Union prison during the Civil War. Lewis Powell, David Herold, George Atzerodt, and Mary Surratt were hung at the Old Arsenal Prison in Washington, D.C. Surratt was the first woman put to death by the United States. The mass hanging took place on July 7, 1865, thus officially ending the Lincoln assassination saga. .

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