Assassination of Abraham Lincoln (1865) at Ford's Theatre

The assassination of Abraham Lincoln took place on the evening of 14 April 1865, when the actor John Wilkes Booth shot the 16th president of the United States in the back of the head at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C. Lincoln died the next morning, only days after the main Confederate army had surrendered. He was the first American president to be murdered, and his death turned the joy of Union victory into national mourning and shaped the troubled peace that followed.

Background: the end of the Civil War

By April 1865 the American Civil War was almost over. Richmond, the Confederate capital, fell on 3 April, and on 9 April General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant at the surrender at Appomattox. Washington celebrated with bands, bonfires and illuminated buildings.

Lincoln had been re-elected in November 1864 and inaugurated for a second term on 4 March 1865. He had issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and pushed the Thirteenth Amendment, which would abolish slavery, through Congress in January 1865. His thoughts were now turning to how the defeated Southern states would be brought back into the Union.

John Wilkes Booth and the conspiracy

John Wilkes Booth, born in Maryland in 1838, was one of the most famous actors in the country and a member of a celebrated theatrical family. He was also a passionate supporter of slavery and the Confederacy, although he never fought for it.

In 1864 Booth gathered a small group of associates to kidnap Lincoln and exchange him for Confederate prisoners of war. The group met at the boarding house of Mary Surratt on H Street in Washington and included her son John Surratt, Lewis Powell (also known as Lewis Paine), David Herold, George Atzerodt, Samuel Arnold and Michael O’Laughlen. An attempt to seize the president on a road outside the city on 17 March 1865 failed when Lincoln changed his plans.

After Lee’s surrender the kidnapping plot no longer made sense. On 11 April Lincoln gave a speech from a White House window in which he spoke in favour of giving the vote to literate Black men and Black Union veterans. Booth was in the crowd, and historians generally agree that the speech hardened his resolve to kill the president.

The night of 14 April 1865

On the morning of 14 April, Good Friday, Booth learned that the president and Mrs Lincoln planned to attend the comedy Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theatre that evening. He knew the building well. Booth assigned Powell, guided by Herold, to kill Secretary of State William Seward, and Atzerodt to kill Vice President Andrew Johnson, all at about the same time.

The Lincolns arrived late with their guests, Major Henry Rathbone and his fiancée Clara Harris, the daughter of a senator. General Grant and his wife had been invited but declined. The policeman assigned to guard the president, John Frederick Parker, was not at his post outside the box when Booth arrived, although exactly where he was remains unclear.

At about 10.15 pm Booth entered the box and fired a single shot from a small .44 calibre Derringer pistol into the back of Lincoln’s head. Rathbone grappled with him and was slashed in the arm with a knife. Booth then leapt about 11 or 12 feet to the stage, catching a spur on a flag that decorated the box, and landed awkwardly. Many witnesses said he shouted “Sic semper tyrannis” (“thus always to tyrants”), the motto of Virginia, before escaping through the back door to a waiting horse.

Lincoln’s death in the Petersen House

A young army surgeon in the audience, Dr Charles Leale, reached the box first and found the president unconscious and barely breathing. Judging that he could not survive a carriage ride to the White House, doctors had him carried across Tenth Street to the Petersen House, a boarding house, where he was laid diagonally across a bed that was too short for him.

Through the night, cabinet members, doctors and officials crowded into the small room, while Secretary of War Edwin Stanton took charge of the government and the investigation from the next room. Lincoln never regained consciousness. He died at 7.22 am on 15 April 1865, aged 56. Witnesses later recorded Stanton saying words to the effect that Lincoln now belonged to the ages, though accounts differ over the exact phrasing.

The attack on Seward and the other targets

Seward was in bed recovering from a serious carriage accident. Lewis Powell got into the house by claiming to bring medicine, fought his way upstairs, fractured the skull of Seward’s son Frederick with his pistol and stabbed the secretary of state several times in the face and neck. Seward survived, perhaps partly because of a metal splint on his jaw. Several others in the household, including Seward’s son Augustus and the soldier-nurse George Robinson, were wounded, but no one died.

George Atzerodt, meanwhile, took a room at the Kirkwood House hotel where Andrew Johnson was staying, but lost his nerve and spent the evening drinking. Johnson was sworn in as president by Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase at the hotel on the morning of 15 April.

The 12-day manhunt

Booth crossed the Navy Yard Bridge into Maryland that night and was soon joined by Herold. They stopped at the Surratt tavern in Surrattsville to collect a rifle and supplies, then rode to the home of Dr Samuel Mudd, who set Booth’s broken left leg. With help from Confederate sympathisers, especially the farmer Thomas Jones, they hid in a pine thicket for several days before crossing the Potomac River into Virginia.

The federal government offered rewards totalling 100,000 dollars and thousands of soldiers and detectives searched the region. Early on 26 April a detachment of the 16th New York Cavalry surrounded Booth and Herold in a tobacco barn on Richard Garrett’s farm near Port Royal, Virginia. Herold surrendered. The barn was set on fire, and Sergeant Boston Corbett shot Booth through the neck, apparently against orders. Booth died a few hours later on the farmhouse porch.

The trial of the conspirators

The government chose to try the accused before a military commission of nine army officers rather than a civilian jury, a decision that was controversial then and remains so. The trial opened in May 1865 and heard hundreds of witnesses. Eight defendants faced charges: Powell, Herold, Atzerodt, Mary Surratt, Mudd, Arnold, O’Laughlen and the stagehand Edman Spangler, who had held Booth’s horse.

All eight were found guilty. Powell, Herold, Atzerodt and Mary Surratt were hanged at the Washington Arsenal on 7 July 1865. Mary Surratt was the first woman executed by the US federal government, and debate continues over how much she knew of the murder plan. Mudd, Arnold and O’Laughlen were sentenced to life imprisonment and Spangler to six years at Fort Jefferson in Florida. O’Laughlen died there of yellow fever in 1867, and President Johnson pardoned the other three in 1869.

John Surratt escaped to Canada and Europe, served for a time in the Papal Zouaves in Rome and was captured in Egypt in 1866. Tried before a civilian court in 1867, he was freed after the jury failed to agree.

A nation in mourning

The news brought crowds into the streets of Northern cities, and black crepe hung from buildings across the country. Lincoln’s body lay in state in the East Room of the White House and then in the Capitol Rotunda. On 21 April a funeral train left Washington carrying his coffin, and that of his son Willie, who had died in 1862, on a journey of roughly 1,650 miles through cities including Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, Cleveland and Chicago.

Millions of people are estimated to have seen the coffin or the train pass. Lincoln was buried at Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield, Illinois, on 4 May 1865. Abroad, including in Britain and France, public meetings sent addresses of sympathy to the United States.

Myths and facts

Myth: Booth broke his leg leaping to the stage. This is the traditional story and may be true, but some historians argue the injury happened later when his horse fell during the escape. The evidence does not settle the question.

Myth: The phrase “his name is mud” comes from Dr Samuel Mudd. The expression, meaning disgrace, is recorded in English before 1865, where “mud” meant a fool. Mudd’s notoriety may have helped keep it popular, but he was not its origin.

Myth: Booth escaped and lived for decades. Claims that another man died in the barn circulated for years. The body was identified at the time by people who knew Booth, including his doctor, and historians reject the escape story.

Legacy

Lincoln’s death removed the leader who had the most authority to guide the country through the end of the war. His successor, Andrew Johnson, a Southern Democrat from Tennessee, soon clashed bitterly with Congress over the treatment of the South and the rights of freed people, a conflict that shaped the Reconstruction era.

The assassination also transformed Lincoln’s reputation. A president who had been fiercely criticised during the war became, in death, a national martyr. Ford’s Theatre, closed for many years, reopened as a working theatre and museum in 1968, and the Petersen House is preserved by the National Park Service.

By the numbers

Timeline

• 1865, 17 March: Booth’s group fails in an attempt to kidnap Lincoln outside Washington.
• 1865, 11 April: Lincoln’s last public speech supports limited voting rights for Black men.
• 1865, 14 April, about 10.15 pm: Booth shoots Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre; Powell attacks Seward.
• 1865, 15 April, 7.22 am: Lincoln dies; Andrew Johnson is sworn in later that morning.
• 1865, 21 April: Lincoln’s funeral train leaves Washington for Illinois.
• 1865, 26 April: Booth is shot at the Garrett farm in Virginia and dies; Herold is captured.
• 1865, 4 May: Lincoln is buried in Springfield, Illinois.
• 1865, 7 July: Mary Surratt, Powell, Herold and Atzerodt are hanged in Washington.

Why it matters

The assassination of Abraham Lincoln was the first murder of an American president and came at the very moment the Union had won the Civil War. It placed the task of rebuilding the nation in the hands of a president at odds with Congress, deepened bitterness between North and South, and made Lincoln one of the most revered figures in American history.