Assassination of Abraham Lincoln

Also called: Lincoln assassination

Five days after Lee’s surrender, the Confederate sympathiser John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre in Washington; Lincoln died the next morning and Vice President Andrew Johnson became president.

On the night of Good Friday, 14 April 1865, Lincoln was watching the comedy Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theatre with his wife when the actor John Wilkes Booth slipped into the presidential box and shot him in the head. Booth leapt to the stage and escaped. The same night a fellow conspirator stabbed and gravely wounded Secretary of State William Seward. Lincoln was carried across the street to the Petersen House and died at 7.22 the next morning, 15 April.

Booth was shot by pursuing troops in a tobacco barn on a Virginia farm on 26 April, and four conspirators were hanged in July. Lincoln’s body travelled by funeral train through many cities to burial in his home town of Springfield. It was the first assassination of an American president, and the loss of a leader who had hoped for a lenient Reconstruction deepened the conflict over how to rebuild the South.