Five days after the war ended, actor John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln at Ford's Theatre — turning the nation's greatest triumph into its most devastating loss.
On the evening of April 14, 1865 — just five days after Lee's surrender — President Lincoln attended a performance of 'Our American Cousin' at Ford's Theatre. John Wilkes Booth, a famous actor who knew the theater intimately, slipped into Lincoln's private box during a moment of audience laughter and fired a single shot behind Lincoln's left ear.
Booth was a devoted Confederate who had watched Lincoln's second inauguration from the crowd in March 1865. When Lincoln gave a speech on April 11 suggesting voting rights for Black Americans, Booth was enraged — and immediately began planning the assassination as a last act to 'save' the Confederacy.
The attack was meant to be a coordinated decapitation strike: while Booth killed Lincoln, co-conspirator Lewis Powell attacked Secretary of State Seward at his home (wounding but not killing him), and George Atzerodt was supposed to assassinate Vice President Johnson — but he lost his nerve and spent the night drunk in a hotel.
After shooting Lincoln, Booth leaped from the presidential box to the stage below — a twelve-foot drop that broke his leg. Despite the injury, he rode out of Washington and was on the run for twelve days before Union soldiers cornered him in a Virginia tobacco barn. When he refused to surrender, Sergeant Boston Corbett shot him dead.
Lincoln was carried unconscious to the Petersen House across the street and lingered through the night, surrounded by his family and cabinet. He never regained consciousness and died at 7:22 AM on April 15. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton reportedly said at that moment: 'Now he belongs to the ages.'
The four principal conspirators — Powell, Herold, Atzerodt, and Mary Surratt — were hanged in July 1865. Surratt became the first woman executed by the U.S. federal government. Lincoln's assassination remains one of the most studied crimes in American history, and debates about the full extent of the conspiracy continue.