THE ASSASSINATION OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN (1865)

LOCATION: Washington, D.C.

PERPETRATORs: John Wilkes Booth and his fellow conspirators.

MOTIVATION: Assassination

BACKGROUND: 

On Good Friday, April 14, President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by the well-known actor John Wilkes Booth shortly after 10 o´ clock in the evening as he was attending a performance in Washington.

Lincoln was attended by two doctors in the audience that night. He had not been killed instantly by the gunshot, but the doctors quickly determined from the nature of his head wound that he would not survive.

The investigation into the assassination of Lincoln focused on known associates of Booth and resulted in numerous arrests, although most of the people held were later released without charge. But the police also discovered a connection to the Washington boarding house run by Mary Surrat, who was arrested there along with Lewis Powell.

The boarding house had been used by the conspirators as a meeting place to discuss what had originally been a plan to abduct Lincoln with the intentions of exchanging it him for Confederate prisoners.

By the time of those arrests Booth was hiding out in an are of dense forest and wetland in southern Maryland known as Zekiah Swamp.

In total eight people were charged with being involved in the conspiracy to assassinate President Lincoln. President Andrew Johnson, who had been sworn into office within hours of Lincoln´s death, ordered that the trial of the conspirators be heard by a military tribunal.

Even if it is not possible to say for certain whether Booth was acting on orders from the Confederate government, he was the driving force behind the conspiracy as it developed from a plot to kidnap a Lincoln into one of assassination. His motivation appears to have been what he saw as an attempt by the North to destroy the culture of the South and, in particular, the institution of slavery. He came to regard Lincoln as the man responsible for this, the embodiment of all that he hated.

OUTCOME: The conspirators succeeded in killing Lincoln but not in their long-term aim of prolonging the Civil War.