Abraham Lincoln Is Shot at Ford’s Theatre

On the evening of April 14, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln attended a performance of the comedy Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C. Accompanied by his wife Mary Todd, Major Henry Rathbone, and Clara Harris, the president sat in an upper box to relax days after Confederate general Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox. The war was drawing to a close, and festive crowds greeted the president with cheers. Guarding arrangements that night, however, were notably lax, leaving the presidential box vulnerable to intrusion.

During the third act, John Wilkes Booth, a well-known actor and ardent Southern sympathizer, slipped into the box. Having previously abandoned an abduction scheme after Confederate fortunes collapsed, Booth had reorganized his followers to decapitate the federal administration. Waiting for a moment in the performance that reliably elicited loud laughter, Booth fired a single-shot pistol into the back of Lincoln’s head, slashed Rathbone with a dagger, and vaulted from the box down to the stage. Witnesses disagreed on his exact words, though many recalled him shouting Virginia’s motto, Sic semper tyrannis, before escaping through a door at the side of the stage and riding off into the night.