Death of Abraham Lincoln
Just after 10 p.m on 14th April 1865, John Wilkes Booth entered President Abraham Lincoln’s private theatre box.
He then shot the president with a single bullet in the back of his head.
The president’s friend, Major Rathbone, attempted to grab Booth but was slashed by Booth’s knife.
Booth injured his leg badly when he jumped on to the stage to escape, however, he managed to hobble outside to his horse then escaped into the night.
A 23-year-old doctor named Charles Leale, was in the audience and hastened to the presidential box immediately.
He found the president slumped in his chair, paralyzed and struggling to breathe.
The president, mortally wounded, was carried to a cheap lodging house opposite Ford’s Theatre.
When the surgeon general arrived at the house, he concluded that Lincoln could not be saved, and would probably die during the night.
At about 7:22 the next morning of the 15th April, President Lincoln passed away at the age of 56.
He was the first U.S. president to be assassinated.
The president’s body was placed in a temporary coffin, draped with a flag, and escorted by armed cavalry to the White House.
Mary Lincoln sent a note requesting that they clip a lock of Lincoln’s hair for her.
Edward Curtis, an Army surgeon in attendance, later described the scene, recounting that a bullet clattered into a waiting basin during the doctors’ removal of Lincoln’s brain.
He wrote that the team stopped to stare at the offending bullet, “the cause of such mighty changes in the world’s history as we may perhaps never realise.”
News of the president’s death travelled quickly.
By the end of the day, flags across the country flew at half-mast, businesses were closed and people who had recently rejoiced at the end of the Civil War now reeled from Lincoln’s shocking assassination.
On 18th April, Lincoln’s body was carried to the Capitol rotunda to lay in state on a catafalque.
Three days later, his remains were boarded onto a train that conveyed him to Springfield, Illinois where he had lived before becoming president.
Lincoln and his son, William ‘Willie’ Wallace Lincoln, who died in the White House of typhoid fever in 1862, were interred on 4th May 1865, at Oak Ridge Cemetery near Springfield.
Mary Todd Lincoln was so devastated, that she took to her bed for weeks and missed the funeral.
On 26th April, Union troops surrounded the Virginia barn where Booth was hiding and set fire to it., hoping to flush the fugitive out.
As the blaze intensified, a sergeant shot Booth in the neck.
Carried out of the building alive, Booth lingered for three hours before gazing at his hands and uttering his last words –
“Useless, useless.”
