Disclaimer: This article contains mentions of murder. Readers are advised to exercise caution.
The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln | The Big Fact
Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President of the United States, served from 1861 to 1865. However, after being re-elected in 1864, he was assassinated the following year. He died just days after the surrender of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, ending the four-year American Civil War. Lincoln, then 56, was assassinated on April 14, 1865 by John Wilkes Booth. The planned assassination has been the subject of several documentaries and television series over the years.
John Wilkes Booth was born in 1838 in Maryland and was an actor, History reports. He eventually turned to the stage after being born into a family of actors. Booth appeared in Shakespeare's Richard III in Baltimore in 1855. During the Civil War, he remained in the North, despite being a Confederate sympathizer. As the war wound down, Booth and several associates plotted to kidnap Abraham Lincoln and take him to the Confederate capital of Richmond.
The outlet reported that the planned kidnapping failed when the president failed to show up at the scene. After General Robert E. Lee surrendered, Booth desperately tried to save the Confederacy by coming up with another plan to attack the president. After learning that Lincoln would be attending Laura Keene's performance of Our American Cousin at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C. on April 14, Booth and his accomplices planned a simultaneous assassination of the president and his possible successors.
