Photograph portrait of John Wilks Booth and poster readeing "$100,000 Dollar Reward"
Left: John Wilkes Booth / By Charles DeForest Fredricks / Albumen argent print, c. 1863 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
Right: One Hundred K Dollar Reward /John H. Surratt, John Wilkes Booth, and David E. Herold
  / Unidentified Artist / Printed Broadside with albumen silver prints, 1865 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Is there a more than famous bad play than My American Cousin, the comedy that Abraham Lincoln was watching at Ford's Theatre when John Wilkes Booth assassinated him? Written in 1858, it was a creaky farce that followed a time-honored script: the awkward but honest American amid bumbling English aristocrats. The existent attraction on the night was English actress and star Laura Keene.

Booth, himself a fine player from a famous family of actors, knew the play, as he knew the layout of Ford'southward Theatre. Whatever 1 must say nearly the evil malignancy of Booth'due south intention to commit murder, his obsessive hatreds, and the consequences of his act, on the night he performed superbly, both stage-managing and acting in the drama of his ain making.

Having decided to kill Lincoln, probably after hearing the president speak on April xi, he galvanized his co-conspirators into activity. His intention was to decapitate the government: he would kill Lincoln while others killed both Secretary of State William Seward and Vice President Andrew Johnson. Booth reconnoitered the theater, drilling a spy pigsty in the door to the presidential box, fashioning a cake to hold the door close once he had entered the box, and arranging to take his equus caballus held in an alley adjacent to the theater. Booth had every intention of escaping southward afterward the murder.

Armed with a knife and a single-shot derringer that fired a large brawl, Booth crept into the presidential box after the play had resumed following the commemoration of the presidential party's inflow. He timed his shot to perfection, shooting the president in the back of the head merely as laughter—which covered the sound of his pistol—erupted following one of the play'south biggest laugh lines: "Don't know the manners of adept society, eh? Well, I guess I know plenty to turn you lot within out, old gal—you sockdologizing former man-trap."

Having fired, Booth slashed his knife at Colonel Henry Rathbone, a invitee in the box with his wife, and leapt down to the stage shouting as he jumped. Opinions differed, but the consensus is that he uttered the Virginia state motto, Sic semper tyrannis (Thus Always to Tyrants). A bone snapped in his leg when he landed, but he scrambled out of the theater, retrieved his horse, and headed to the southeast, escaping into Maryland.

Chaos erupted at the theater once everyone realized what had happened. Amongst the hysteria and confusion, several doctors pushed their way into the presidential box and attempted to minister to the mortally wounded president. Every bit he lay dying, events took a plow for the macabre: Laura Keene forced her way into the box and insisted that she cradle the president in her arms. Incredibly, this was immune, and for several minutes she rocked the president in her arms, creating a bizarre pieta on the floor of the box; she would later display her blood-spattered clothes as an attraction.

The doctors and hangers-on behaved lilliputian better: already relic- and souvenir-hunters were sniffing around the presidential torso. I of the doctors preserved small fragments of the president'south skull, hair was snipped from the presidential head, and bits were taken of his habiliment and bedclothes from the room where Lincoln died, across the street from the theater. Already Lincoln, however living, was becoming the object of veneration and remembrance, some of it tasteless past any standard.

Booth's swain conspirators did not succeed equally well as their leader. Lewis Powell managed to severely wound Seward, who was saved by the heavy cervix caryatid he was wearing after a railroad vehicle accident. Those tasked with killing Andrew Johnson simply lost their nervus and ran away. The conspirators were apace rounded upward because they were identified as associates of Booth (who was himself identified immediately at the theater), left an easily followed trail of prove, and merely waited to be captured. But Booth kept his nerve and got away with accomplice David Herold. He escaped capture until April 26, when he was cornered and shot in a Virginia befouled.

Lincoln finally expired at vii:21 on the morning time of April 15. Mary was disconsolate and overwrought, she had been kept away from the dying president past the doctors, who found her out of control. She sequestered herself in her bedroom at the White Business firm, absenting herself from the funeral arrangements except to insist that her husband be buried in Springfield, Illinois, non Washington. The transport of Lincoln'southward body to Springfield became a national ritual of grief as the coffin was unloaded and displayed in major cities along the way. Thousands lined upwardly for hours to view the carefully embalmed body of the president, an human activity of secular grief that had religious overtones. Every bit with the relic-taking, Lincoln was already being transformed from a living, historical figure to an American saint.  Equally Secretarial assistant of State of war Edwin Stanton said, "Now he belongs to the ages" or alternatively, "Now he belongs to the angels."

History was giving way to myth through the presentation of the body and his martyrdom—a martyrdom that occurred at the very moment of his triumph. African Americans, who were grateful for Lincoln's evolution on the outcome of freedom and citizenship and rightly feared that the loss of Lincoln boded badly for them, were vocal in their sense of loss. The South worried that the assassination would bring down renewed violence on it out of vengeance and retribution.

Lincoln was not universally mourned in both the South and the N, although individuals who applauded Booth's actions mostly had the good sense to go on quiet. Virtually interestingly, among the most radical abolitionists, including many Republican officeholders, in that location evolved a curious justification of the assassination. Distrusting Lincoln's commitment to abolitionism, they came close to justifying the human activity as the closing of one chapter and the opening of another.

Lincoln, in other words, had done his piece of work to win the state of war and preserve the Union. Fate had now intervened to remove him from history's phase to exist replaced past a leader who would give total civic and social equality to the freemen. Every bit the presidency of Andrew Johnson and the form of Reconstruction would demonstrate, they would be proved  spectacularly wrong, as they had been consistently wrong nigh the character and abilities of Abraham Lincoln.

—David C. Ward, Senior Historian, National Portrait Gallery