In Washington, D.C. on April 14th, 1865 the famous actor and confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth shot president Lincoln at the Ford’s Theatre. The attack occurred five days after Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered his massive army at Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia, completely ending the American Civil War.
Abraham Lincoln’s assassinator, John Wilkes Booth, was born in Maryland in 1838 who lived there during the Civil War even with his Confederates. As the conflict began to enter its final stages, he and multiple associates plotted to kidnap the president and take him to Richmond, the Confederate capital. But, on March 20, 1865, the day of the attempted kidnapping, Lincoln did not show up where Booth and his six fellow associates were waiting. Richmond fell into union forces two weeks later. And in April, with Confederate armies almost collapsing across the South, Booth came up with a desperate plan to save the Confederacy. Realizing that Lincoln would be attending Laura Keene’s performance of “Our American Cousin” at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C. on April 14th, …show more content…
He found the president fallen in his chair, paralyzed and struggling to breathe. Multiple soldiers carried Lincoln to a house across the street and placed him on a bed. When the surgeon general arrived at the house, he stated that Lincoln could not be saved because of the bullet wound and would pass through the night. Vice President Andrew Johnson, members of Lincoln’s cabinet and multiple of the president’s closest friends stood close by Lincoln’s bedside until he was officially pronounced dead at 7:22 a.m. The president’s body was placed in a temporary coffin, draped with a flag and taken to the White House, where surgeons conducted a profound autopsy. During the autopsy, Mary Lincoln sent the surgeons a note requesting that they clip a lock of Lincoln’s hair for