The American Civil War had effectively ended five days earlier with Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House on 9 April 1865. Washington was in a state of public relief and celebration. President Abraham Lincoln, re-elected in November 1864, had given his Second Inaugural Address on 4 March 1865 with the famous closing phrase “with malice toward none, with charity for all.”
The John Wilkes Booth conspiracy had originally been a kidnapping plot — to seize Lincoln, smuggle him to Richmond, and exchange him for the release of Confederate prisoners of war. The April 1865 collapse of the Confederacy converted the plot into an assassination scheme. Booth and his co-conspirators decided to kill Lincoln, Vice President Andrew Johnson, and Secretary of State William Seward simultaneously on the same evening to decapitate the federal executive.
Booth was a 26-year-old actor from a prominent theatrical family. He had performed at Ford’s Theatre on many occasions and was personally acquainted with the staff. The theatre’s owners had offered Lincoln a private box for the evening’s performance of the comedy Our American Cousin on Friday 14 April 1865. Booth knew exactly where the President would be sitting.
10:15 p.m.
Booth arrived at Ford’s Theatre at about 9:30 p.m. He entered the presidential box from the rear corridor at about 10:14 p.m. The box was guarded by a single Washington police officer, John Parker, who had left his post to watch the play (or, in some accounts, to drink at a neighbouring tavern). Lincoln’s military aide Major Henry Rathbone was in the box with the President and Mrs Lincoln but had no weapon.
Booth waited for the laughter line in Act III, Scene 2 — the line “you sockdologizing old man-trap” — to mask the shot. He pulled a small single-shot Deringer pistol from his pocket and shot Lincoln in the back of the head from approximately 60 cm range. The.44 calibre lead ball entered behind the left ear and lodged behind the right eye.
Rathbone tried to grab Booth. Booth slashed Rathbone’s arm with a dagger and leapt from the box to the stage — approximately 3.5 metres. He caught his spur in the bunting decorating the front of the box and landed badly, breaking his left leg above the ankle. He limped across the stage shouting “Sic semper tyrannis!” (“thus always to tyrants” — the Virginia state motto) and escaped out the rear of the theatre to a waiting horse.
Lincoln was carried across the street to the Petersen Boarding House. He was placed in a small first-floor bedroom on a bed that was too short for his 1.93-metre frame. Three surgeons including Charles Leale and Joseph Barnes attended. The wound was unrecoverable. Lincoln never regained consciousness. He died at 7:22 a.m. on 15 April 1865.
What the rest of the plot did
The Andrew Johnson assassination assignment had been given to a German immigrant named George Atzerodt. Atzerodt lost his nerve, got drunk in his hotel bar near Johnson’s lodgings, and never made the attempt.
The William Seward assassination was attempted by Lewis Powell, who forced his way into the Secretary of State’s house at about 10:15 p.m. claiming to deliver medicine. Seward was bedridden recovering from a recent carriage accident. Powell stabbed Seward five times in the face and throat with a Bowie knife. A metal splint Seward was wearing to support his broken jaw deflected the throat wounds. Powell also stabbed two members of the Seward household and a State Department messenger before fleeing. Seward survived. He continued as Secretary of State and negotiated the 1867 purchase of Alaska from Russia.
The coordinated decapitation strike had killed only one of its three targets.
The manhunt
Booth and his fellow conspirator David Herold crossed the Potomac into Virginia in the early hours of 15 April. The federal manhunt was extensive — approximately 10,000 troops and federal agents were deployed across Maryland and northern Virginia. The two were tracked down on 26 April 1865 at the Garrett farm near Port Royal, Virginia.
The Garrett family had been told the two were Confederate soldiers in need of shelter and had hosted them in their tobacco barn for two nights. The Union 16th New York Cavalry surrounded the barn at approximately 2 a.m. on 26 April. Herold surrendered. Booth refused. The cavalry set the barn on fire to flush him out. Sergeant Boston Corbett shot Booth through a gap in the planks, against orders. Booth was paralysed by the shot — which had hit his spinal cord — and died approximately two hours later on the Garrett porch. He was 26.
His last reported words were “Useless, useless” — staring at his own hands.
What followed
Eight conspirators were tried by military tribunal at the Washington Navy Yard arsenal in May-June 1865. Four — Lewis Powell, David Herold, George Atzerodt, and the Maryland boarding-house keeper Mary Surratt — were hanged on 7 July 1865. Mary Surratt was the first woman executed by the United States federal government. The other four were sentenced to imprisonment; one died in prison, three were pardoned by President Andrew Johnson in 1869.
The Lincoln state funeral train carried his body from Washington to Springfield, Illinois, across nine states from 21 April to 3 May 1865. Approximately 7 million Americans — about a quarter of the entire 1865 population — viewed the funeral procession at one or more of its stops.
Ford’s Theatre was closed by federal order in summer 1865. The building was used for federal storage until 1893, then partially renovated and used as a museum from 1968 onwards. The Petersen House across the street, where Lincoln died, was acquired by the federal government in 1896 and is part of the same museum complex. The bed on which Lincoln died is on display at the Chicago History Museum.