Until the assassination of John F. Kennedy a century later, no event rocked the American psyche as much as the death of Abraham Lincoln, cut down at the very moment of his greatest triumph, like a latter-day Moses who led his people to the verge of the Promised Land only to die within sight of it. The events surrounding Lincoln’s death have captivated the American popular imagination ever since, most recently in Steven Spielberg’s 2012 film Lincoln.
On April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee, commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant, the Union commander, at Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia. Although rogue elements of the Confederate forces continued hostilities for some time, and although the road to peace and reconciliation was to be a rough one, the Civil War was over, for all intents and purposes. Radical Confederate loyalists, however, who had long hated Abraham Lincoln above all others, still thirsted for vengeance and harbored a dim hope of rekindling the fires of rebellion. John Wilkes Booth is the best known of these figures today, because, lamentably, he was the most successful.
A Currier & Ives lithograph depiction of the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theater by John Wilkes Booth on Good Friday, April 14, 1865. This widely known image helped both to burnish and to disseminate accounts of this landmark event in American history. Already a figure of heroic proportions in the American popular imagination, Lincoln’s assassination raised the fallen president to mythic status, and folklore and fantasy concerning the historical personages and events involved became part and parcel of the legend of Lincoln. (Library of Congress)
Just five days after the surrender at Appomattox, on April 14, 1865, Good Friday, President Abraham Lincoln and his wife attended a performance of Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theater in Washington, DC. Actor and Southern radical activist John Wilkes Booth had plotted with co-conspirators not a full month before to kidnap Lincoln; on the morning of April 14, Booth, an actor, heard of the president’s plans when he stopped by the theater to check his mail. Unwilling to accept the defeat of the Confederacy, Booth spent the remainder of the day planning his assassination attempt on Lincoln.
Booth returned to Ford’s Theater before the performance, manipulating the latch on the door of Lincoln’s box so that he would be able to block entry from the inside. Later in the evening, during the play, Booth was able to enter the box and shoot Lincoln in the back of the head. Eluding attempts to restrain him, Booth then vaulted over the lip of the box, famously shouting “Sic Semper Tyrannis,” or “Thus Ever to Tyrants,” an obvious classical allusion to the Southern perception of Lincoln as a dictator and usurper of states’ rights and the perceived strong-arm tactics of the North, as well as the official motto of the Commonwealth of Virginia. Booth was also reported to have shouted “The South is avenged!” as he plummeted to the stage, where he broke his left leg. Badly injured but still able to move quickly, Booth managed to make it to his waiting horse in the alley and flee into the night.
Around 4:00 a.m., Booth arrived at the house of Samuel Mudd, a doctor in Maryland known to the conspirators. Mudd set Booth’s broken leg, and was later sentenced to life in prison by a military tribunal for aiding and abetting the assassin. Although the phrase “his name is mud” was in use some decades before these events, its popular employment in American English greatly increased as a result of the notoriety of Dr. Mudd, and to this day many Americans believe the folk etymology that claims that the phrase was coined in commemoration of these events. Lincoln was moved to the Peterson Boarding house near the theater, where he was pronounced dead at 7:22 a.m. on Saturday, April 15, 1865.
As part of the conspiracy, just as Lincoln was being shot, Booth’s collaborator Lewis Powell made a concurrent attempt upon the life of Secretary of State William Seward; although Powell wounded Seward with a knife, the attempt was unsuccessful, and Powell fled the scene. Booth, meanwhile, left Dr. Mudd’s house in the company of co-conspirator David Herold; the fugitives spent several days on the run in the countryside, sometimes within earshot of search parties hunting them. During the week following Lincoln’s assassination, several of Booth’s co-conspirators were arrested, and eventually a bounty of $100,000 was posted for the fugitives still at large. After several days and an abortive attempt to cross the Potomac, Booth and Herold finally made it from Maryland to Virginia on April 24, when they sought refuge in Richard Garrett’s barn. Federal troops, informed of Booth’s whereabouts, surrounded Garrett’s barn two days later. Herold surrendered, but when Booth refused, the soldiers set the barn alight; subsequently, Booth was killed by a shot in the neck. Eight of Booth’s co-conspirators stood trial together; four were hanged and four were imprisoned. A ninth conspirator was later freed by a hung jury.
The timing of Lincoln’s assassination—right on the heels of Northern victory and upon the eve of the most sacred and symbolic of Christian holidays—seems in retrospect tailor-made for conspiracy theories, and these indeed spread like wildfire almost as soon as Booth’s shot rang out. Since the plans and actions of Booth and his compatriots did, in fact, comprise a conspiracy, it was not entirely ridiculous to suppose that those killed, captured, tried, and sentenced for the assassination of Lincoln represented just the tip of the iceberg of a far vaster network. Perhaps the most obvious assumption was that Booth and company were pawns in a larger, last-ditch Confederate gambit to reinvigorate rebellion while the U.S. government was cast into chaos. Northern antiwar “Copperheads” were also the subject of conspiracy rumors, as were secret societies; Lincoln’s vice president and secretary of war were both named as possible villains, as was the Catholic Church. Although these rumors were fecund soil for American folklore and legends, however, none appears to hold water.
Lincoln’s funeral was held on April 19, and the train carrying his body left Washington two days later; for nearly two weeks the nation mourned as Lincoln took his final journey. Abraham Lincoln was a larger-than-life figure even before his untimely assassination: Lincoln was the Great Emancipator to African Americans, “Honest Abe” to his followers, and the epitome of Northern arrogance and aggression to his enemies. Famous for his folksy wisdom and shrewd employment of a good yarn, Lincoln self-consciously and unabashedly took an active hand in authoring elements of his own mythology. He might even be said to have been the greatest political purveyor of the tall tale in American history. Then, at one terrible stroke, slain dramatically almost at the very moment of the triumph of the Union he had been dedicated to preserve, Lincoln was catapulted to the very highest ranks of the pantheon of American myth, legend, and folklore. Lincoln was thus forever enshrined among the Founding Fathers as one who, in the words of his own immortal Gettysburg Address, “gave the last full measure of devotion” in his tireless quest to bring about “a new birth of freedom.”
Lincoln’s new status as a Christ-like figure who had sacrificed himself upon the altar of the freedom and union of his people was immediately and abidingly asserted by Walt Whitman (1819–1892) in his poem “O Captain! My Captain!” published shortly after Lincoln’s death. This work, which eulogized Lincoln as a fallen hero, lamented that, just as “[t]he ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,” Lincoln, the captain of the ship of state, the hero of the struggle, has been laid low: “on the deck my Captain lies, [f]allen cold and dead.” Whitman’s passionate lament has remained a part of the American psyche and classroom to this day, even among those who fail to remember the subject of the poem, the enduring emotional power of which was perhaps most popularly rendered in recent memory by Robin Williams in The Dead Poets Society (1989).
Booth, John Wilkes (1838–1865)
Dramatic by nature as well as vocation, John Wilkes Booth fully expected to be hailed as a hero when he assassinated Abraham Lincoln. Instead, he was propelled into the ranks of the most reviled of American villains, a traitor on par with Benedict Arnold and a celebrity murderer remembered in the same breath as Lee Harvey Oswald. Booth has been styled an “American Brutus,” a title he might have embraced as the appropriate sobriquet of a tyrant slayer; for most Americans, however, Booth is more a Judas-figure who slew a Christ-like Abraham Lincoln on Good Friday.
C. Fee
Lincoln remains an almost ubiquitous presence in American society today, gazing at us from the penny and the five-dollar bill, as well as from his seat in the Lincoln Memorial, which has served as the backdrop for many of the most notable rallies and events of recent American history. Perhaps the most famous among these was the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech during the civil rights movement, which claimed Lincoln as its own. Already a legend in his own lifetime, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln anointed him forever as an American martyr and secular saint, the eternal patron of the “proposition that all men are created equal.”
C. Fee
See also Conspiracy Theories; Kennedy, John F., Assassination of; Lennon, John, Shooting of; McCartney, Paul, Alleged Death of
Further Reading
Kauffman, Michael W. 2004. American Brutus: John Wilkes Booth and the Lincoln Conspiracies. New York: Random House.
Larson, Kate Clifford. 2008. The Assassin’s Accomplice: Mary Surratt and the Plot to Kill Abraham Lincoln. New York: Basic Books.
Norton, R. J. 1996. “Lincoln Assassination Theories: A Simple Conspiracy or a Grand Conspiracy?” Abraham Lincoln’s Assassination website. http://rogerjnorton.com/Lincoln74.html. Accessed July 18, 2014.
Steers, Edward. 2001. Blood on the Moon: The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.
Swanson, James L. 2006. Manhunt: The Twelve-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer. New York: William Morrow.