Printer-friendly version
Five days after the surrender of Robert E. Lee to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, the war claimed one of its last casualties.On April 15, 1865, the famous actor John Wilkes Booth shot President Abraham Lincoln while attending a performance of Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theatre in Washington D.C., He was carried to a house across the street from the theatre and died the next morning.
The investigation into the assassination revealed Booth to be the mastermind of a conspiracy to throw the government into disarray by simultaneously murdering the president, vice president Johnson, and Secretary of State Seward. Booth was cornered and killed by Union soldiers in Virginia on April 26, 1865. His co-conspirators, George Azterodt, Lewis Powell, David Herold, and Mary Surratt were captured, convicted, and later executed by hanging on July 7, 1865.
Capt. Richard S. Collum was in attendance at Ford’s theatre the night of the assassination. This eye witness account, written twenty- three years after the fact, details the events of the evening Lincoln was shot. It also describes the arrest and incarceration of Booth’s co-conspirators as well as the fate of Booth’s remains.
Lincoln’s body traveled aboard a train from Washington D.C. to his hometown of Springfield, Illinois. Nearly 7 million Americans lined the railroad tracks along the 1,600-mile route to pay their respects as the President’s remains were brought to their resting place. Soldiers still in the field of war reacted with great emotion, as these two letters home illustrate.