President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by a lone gunman, John Wilkes Booth, five days after the formal end of the Civil War. And while there were at least eight co-conspirators (four of which were convicted and hanged), Booth alone made the fateful decision to kill the president on the night of April 14, 1865, because of his emancipation of slaves.
In a letter to his brother-in-law just a few months prior, Booth wrote: "This country was formed for the white not for the black man. And looking upon African slavery from the same stand-point, as held by those noble framers of our Constitution, I for one, have ever considered it, one of the greatest blessings (both for themselves and us) that God ever bestowed upon a favored nation."
Booth attended Lincoln’s second inauguration on March 4 and heard Lincoln’s call for limited Negro suffrage—giving the right to vote to those who had served in the military during the war. Hearing those words, Booth reportedly said to his companions, "That means nigger citizenship. That is the last speech he will ever make."
The Lincoln conspirators led by Booth planned to kidnap the president on March 17 as he returned from a play at the Campbell Hospital outside Washington, D.C. and take him to the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia and hold him hostage. That plot collapsed when Lincoln changed his schedule.
On a chance visit to Ford’s Theater on Good Friday, Booth learned that Lincoln and General Grant would be attending that evening. He hurriedly devised a plot with his co-conspirators in which he would kill Lincoln and Grant while others would murder Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William Seward simultaneously at 10:15 p.m, thereby plunging the Union into disarray and allowing the Southern fight to be revived.
Only Booth’s murder of Lincoln went as planned.
