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N0KFQ > TODAY 14.04.08 05:25l 57 Lines 2594 Bytes #999 (0) @ WW
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Subj: Today in History - Apr 14
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To : TODAY@ALLUS
April 14, 1865
Lincoln is shot
On this day in 1865, John Wilkes Booth, an actor and Confederate
sympathizer, fatally shoots President Abraham Lincoln at a play
at Ford's Theater in Washington, D.C. The attack came only five
days after Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered his
massive army at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, effectively
ending the American Civil War.
Booth, a Maryland native born in 1838, who remained in the North
during the war despite his Confederate sympathies, initially
plotted to capture President Lincoln and take him to Richmond,
the Confederate capital. However, on March 20, 1865, the day of
the planned kidnapping, the president failed to appear at the
spot where Booth and his six fellow conspirators lay in wait. Two
weeks later, Richmond fell to Union forces. In April, with
Confederate armies near collapse across the South, Booth hatched
a desperate plan to save the Confederacy.
Learning that Lincoln was to attend a performance of "Our
American Cousin" at Ford's Theater on April 14, Booth
masterminded the simultaneous assassination of Lincoln, Vice
President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William H.
Seward. By murdering the president and two of his possible
successors, Booth and his conspirators hoped to throw the U.S.
government into disarray.
On the evening of April 14, conspirator Lewis T. Powell burst
into Secretary of State Seward's home, seriously wounding him and
three others, while George A. Atzerodt, assigned to Vice
President Johnson, lost his nerve and fled. Meanwhile, just after
10 p.m., Booth entered Lincoln's private theater box unnoticed
and shot the president with a single bullet in the back of his
head. Slashing an army officer who rushed at him, Booth leapt to
the stage and shouted "Sic semper tyrannis! [Thus always to
tyrants]--the South is avenged!" Although Booth broke his leg
jumping from Lincoln's box, he managed to escape Washington on
horseback.
The president, mortally wounded, was carried to a lodging house
opposite Ford's Theater. About 7:22 a.m. the next morning,
Lincoln, age 56, died--the first U.S. president to be
assassinated. Booth, pursued by the army and other secret forces,
was finally cornered in a barn near Bowling Green, Virginia, and
died from a possibly self-inflicted bullet wound as the barn was
burned to the ground. Of the eight other people eventually
charged with the conspiracy, four were hanged and four were
jailed.
Lincoln, the 16th U.S. president, was buried on May 4, 1865, in
Springfield, Illinois.
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