Lincolnʼs AssassinationDirections: Carefully read and then re-read and highlight. Next, answer the questions on back.

On the evening of April 14, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln attended a special performance of the comedy play, “Our American Cousin.” Accompanying him at Ford’s Theater that night were his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, a twenty-eight year-old military officer named Major Henry R. Rathbone, and Rathbone’s fiancée, Clara Harris. After the play began, a figure with a drawn .44 caliber pistol stepped into the presidential box, aimed, and fired, striking Lincoln in the back of the head. The President slumped forward.

The gunman, John Wilkes Booth, dropped the pistol and waved a dagger. Major Rathbone lunged at him, and though slashed in the arm, forced the killer to the railing. Booth leapt from the balcony, catching the spur of his left boot on a flag draped over the rail. He shattered a bone in his leg as he landed. From the stage witnesses said Booth shouted the Virginia state motto, “Sic semper tyrannis,” which is Latin for “Thus always to tyrants.” Others reported him as saying, “The South is avenged.” Whatever his exact words were, the injured assassin rushed out the back door and disappeared into the night on horseback.

A doctor in the audience immediately went upstairs into the President’s box. The bullet had entered through Lincoln’s left ear and lodged behind his right eye. He was paralyzed and barely breathing. Men carried the fallen President across Tenth Street, to a boarding-house opposite the theater, but doctors’ best efforts failed. Nine hours later, at 7:22 AM on April 15th, Lincoln died.

At almost the same moment Booth fired the fatal shot, his accomplice, Lewis Powell, attacked Lincoln’s Secretary of State, William Seward, who lay in bed recovering from a carriage accident. Powell entered Seward’s mansion, claiming to have a delivery of medicine from the Secretary’s doctor. Seward’s son, Frederick, tried to keep Powell away from his father’s door, but Powell savagely beat him. Powell then slashed the Secretary’s throat twice before fleeing.

Powell escaped into the night, believing his deed complete. However, a metal surgical collar saved Seward from certain death.

He lived another seven years, during which he kept his position under the new President, Andrew Johnson.

In addition to Booth, at least four others were involved in the mayhem. Booth was shot and captured while hiding in a barn in Virginia, and died later the same day, April 26, 1865. Four co-conspirators, Powell, George Atzerodt, David Herold, and Mary Surratt, were hanged in Washington, D.C. on July 7, 1865.

President Lincoln's funeral procession in New York City

Adapted from: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/alhtml/alrintr.html

1. Why is April 14, 1865 a significant date in U.S. history?

_____________________________________________________________________

_____________________________________________________________________

2. What happened to John Wilkes Booth?

_____________________________________________________________________

_____________________________________________________________________

_____________________________________________________________________

3. What happened to Secretary of State William Seward the night of the assassination?

_____________________________________________________________________

_____________________________________________________________________

4. How do you think the nation, both the North and the South, might react to the death of President Lincoln?

_____________________________________________________________________

_____________________________________________________________________

_____________________________________________________________________

_____________________________________________________________________

5. What effect might the assassination and the conspiracy [scheme, secret plot] have on the rebuilding of the nation after the war (Reconstruction)?

_____________________________________________________________________

_____________________________________________________________________

_____________________________________________________________________

_____________________________________________________________________

_____________________________________________________________________