May 5, 1838 - John Wilkes Booth
A celebrated actor who turned a moment of national exhaustion — Lee's surrender just days prior — into the site of a calculated political killing, Booth carried out what had begun as an abduction plot and became a coordinated, if partially failed, attempt to decapitate the Union government. His shot at Ford's Theatre on April 14, 1865, was the only piece of the conspiracy to fully succeed, ending Lincoln's life the following morning. The act reverberated far beyond the moment, reshaping Reconstruction and the trajectory of postwar America in ways its perpetrator never lived to witness.
From Wikipedia
John Wilkes Booth (May 10, 1838 – April 26, 1865) was an American stage actor who assassinated United States president Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C., on April 14, 1865. A member of the prominent 19th-century Booth theatrical family from Maryland, he was a noted actor who was also a Confederate sympathizer; denouncing Lincoln, he lamented the then-recent abolition of slavery in the United States.
Originally, Booth and his small group of conspirators had plotted to kidnap Lincoln to aid the Confederate cause. They later decided to murder him, as well as Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William H. Seward. Although the Army of Northern Virginia, commanded by General Robert E. Lee, had surrendered to the Union Army four days earlier, Booth believed that the American Civil War remained unresolved because the Army of Tennessee of General Joseph E. Johnston continued fighting.
Booth shot Lincoln once in the back of the head. Lincoln's death the next morning completed Booth's piece of the plot. Seward, severely wounded, recovered, whereas Vice President Johnson was never attacked.
- Last updated on .