Five days after Lee surrendered at Appomattox, John Wilkes Booth walked into Ford's Theatre and killed Abraham Lincoln.

It was the most consequential act of terrorism in American history. In one moment, Booth did not save the Confederacy — it was already finished — but he removed the one man most likely to oversee a reconstruction that treated the South with the "malice toward none" Lincoln had promised in his second inaugural five weeks earlier.

The Conspirator

John Wilkes Booth was 26 years old, a celebrated stage actor from a famous theatrical family, and a Confederate sympathizer who had spent the war watching the cause he loved go slowly under. He was not, by most accounts, unstable — he was calculated. His original plan was kidnapping: seize Lincoln, hold him hostage, extract a prisoner exchange that would refill Confederate armies. That plan fell apart in March 1865 when Lincoln changed his schedule.

By April 11, when Lincoln gave a public speech from a White House window that mentioned extending voting rights to some Black men, Booth was standing in the crowd. He told a companion that it was the last speech Lincoln would ever give.

The Night of April 14

Ford's Theatre on Tenth Street was packed for the comedy "Our American Cousin." Lincoln arrived late, at approximately 8:30 p.m. The audience applauded. Lincoln settled into his box above the stage.

Booth arrived at the theatre at around 10:00 p.m. He knew the building — had performed there. He knew the play, knew the moment of the biggest laugh, and timed his entrance to the presidential box for that moment, calculating that the audience noise would cover the shot.

At approximately 10:15 p.m., during a line that drew the evening's biggest laugh, Booth entered the box, pressed a single-shot .44 caliber derringer behind Lincoln's left ear, and fired.

Major Henry Rathbone, who was in the box with Lincoln and his wife Mary, grappled with Booth. Booth stabbed him in the arm, vaulted the railing to the stage below — catching his spur on the bunting and breaking his leg in the fall — and shouted something that witnesses variously recalled as "Sic semper tyrannis" or "The South is avenged" before running out the stage door.

Lincoln was carried to the Petersen House across the street. He died at 7:22 a.m. on April 15, 1865, without regaining consciousness. He was 56 years old.

The Conspiracy

Booth had not acted alone. The plan called for simultaneous assassinations of Lincoln, Vice President Andrew Johnson, and Secretary of State William Seward — an attempt to decapitate the Union government.

Lewis Powell entered Seward's home that night, fought through Seward's son and a nurse, and attacked Seward in his sickbed — stabbing him repeatedly in the face and neck. Seward survived because a metal splint he was wearing from an earlier carriage accident deflected the knife from his jugular.

The man assigned to kill Andrew Johnson lost his nerve and spent the night drinking in the hotel bar downstairs from Johnson's rooms.

The Manhunt and Its End

Booth fled through southern Maryland with co-conspirator David Herold, stopping at Dr. Samuel Mudd's farm to have his broken leg set. He crossed the Potomac into Virginia and was tracked to a tobacco barn on the Garrett farm near Port Royal, Virginia.

On April 26, Union cavalry surrounded the barn. Herold surrendered. Booth refused. The barn was set on fire. Sergeant Boston Corbett, firing through the barn slats, shot Booth in the neck. He was dragged out, paralyzed, and died on the Garrett farmhouse porch at 7:15 a.m. — almost exactly 11 days after Lincoln.

His last words, staring at his own hands: "Useless. Useless."

What Was Lost

The question of what Lincoln's survival would have meant for Reconstruction is impossible to answer with certainty, but the historical evidence suggests it would have looked very different from what Andrew Johnson provided.

Johnson, who had no interest in Black civil rights and deep sympathy for the white Southern planter class, dismantled the framework Lincoln had been building. The result — Reconstruction's failure, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, the Black Codes, and a century of Jim Crow — is not solely attributable to Lincoln's absence, but the absence mattered.

Booth wanted to reverse the war's verdict. He failed at that. But he succeeded in removing the leader most likely to make the verdict stick.