Abraham Lincoln’s Assassin: Who Was John Wilkes Booth?

Abraham Lincoln’s Assassin: Who Was John Wilkes Booth? By , the 16th president of the United States, served from 1861 to 1865. However, after getting reelected in 1864, he was assassinated the following year. He died days after Confederate General Robert E.

Lee’s surrender, which ended the four-year American Civil War. Lincoln, 56 at the time, was assassinated by on April 14, 1865. The planned killing has been the subject of several documentaries and series over the years.

Who was Abraham Lincoln’s killer, John Wilkes Booth? Born in 1838 in Maryland, John Wilkes Booth was an actor, reported . He eventually took 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. While the war was entering its final stages, Booth and several associates plotted to kidnap and take him to the Confederate capital, Richmond. The outlet reported that the planned abduction failed when the president didn’t appear at the spot.

After General Robert E. Lee surrendered, Booth desperately tried to save the Confederacy as he came up with another plan to attack the president. After learning that Lincoln would attend Laura Keene’s performance of Our American Cousin on April 14 at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.

C., Booth and his co-conspirators planned a simultaneous assassination of the president and his possible successors. On the day of the .