Assassination of Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln was shot on the evening of 14 April 1865, five days after Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox, by the actor John Wilkes Booth while he was watching the play Our American Cousin at Ford's Theatre in Washington. He died the next morning in a boarding house across the street. Booth was a Confederate sympathizer, and the plot also called for killing Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William Seward, who was badly wounded in an attack at his home. Booth escaped but was tracked down and killed twelve days later at a farm in Virginia. Eight others were tried by a military commission, and four were hanged, including Mary Surratt. Lincoln was the first American president to be assassinated.

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