Person1838 – 1865

John Wilkes Booth

Actor and Confederate sympathiser who shot Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre on 14 April 1865 and was killed by pursuing troops in Virginia twelve days later

Born into the famous Booth acting family, he was a popular Shakespearean actor. A Marylander and ardent supporter of the South and slavery, he stood among the militia at John Brown’s hanging in 1859. In 1864 he plotted to kidnap Lincoln and exchange him for Confederate prisoners, but after Lee’s surrender, and Lincoln’s talk of giving Black men the vote, he turned to assassination. He shot Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre on 14 April 1865, fled for twelve days and was shot dead on a Virginia farm.

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1865Assassination of Abraham Lincolnkey figure
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.

People who appear alongside

Abraham Lincoln1809 – 1865
16th US president (1861–1865) who preserved the Union in the Civil War and issued the Emancipation Proclamation; assassinated just after the war ended

Themes this person appears in

The American Civil War1850 – 1865
From the Compromise of 1850 to Lincoln’s assassination — a nation divided over slavery fought four years of civil war, preserving the Union and ending slavery