Lincoln: The First Presidential Assassination

Summary

Podcast Summary: "Lincoln: The First Presidential Assassination"

Podcast: American History Hit
Host: Don Wildman
Guest: Michael Kaufman (author of American Brutus)
Date: December 22, 2025

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Main Theme / Purpose

This episode explores the assassination of Abraham Lincoln—America’s first presidential assassination—set against the closing days of the Civil War. Host Don Wildman and historian Michael Kaufman delve into John Wilkes Booth's complex plot, the cast of conspirators, the shifting motivations behind the crime, and how the tragedy set the stage for the nation’s difficult road through Reconstruction.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Setting the Stage: The Night of the Assassination

• Context of April 14, 1865 at Ford’s Theater:
  • The atmosphere was festive, with the Union’s victory fresh in everyone’s minds (01:41).
  • President Lincoln attended the play "Our American Cousin" with his wife and friends.
  • Security was lax: Lincoln’s assigned bodyguard, John Frederick Parker, was derelict—having left his post for a drink with colleagues at the nearby Star Saloon. Booth drank at the same bar just before the assassination.
    • “The lapse won’t cost him his badge. But it will earn him a grim place in history as the guard who abandoned his post the fateful night of Lincoln’s murder.” (01:41, Don Wildman)

Booth’s Motivation and the Conspiracy’s Roots

• Not Spontaneous Anger—A Year-Long Plot:
  • Booth, a famous but second-tier actor from a politically divided Maryland family, began planning Lincoln’s abduction as early as 1864 (06:16, Michael Kaufman).
    • It started as an effort to force a resumption of POW exchanges by holding Lincoln hostage.
      • “The idea originally was to help the Confederacy by forcing the federal government to exchange prisoners of war.” (06:20, Michael Kaufman)
    • Booth was persuasive, manipulating friends old and new into his inner circle—often keeping them isolated from one another.
      • “John Wilkes Booth had formed several different groups of people unknown to each other...Some of them were quasi confederates and others were just personal friends…” (09:13, Michael Kaufman)
    • He exploited the legal gray area where, at the time, hostage-taking was technically not illegal.

The Cast of Conspirators

• Booth used his theatrical charisma to assemble a cast seemingly drawn from a play:
  • David Herold: The “fool,” immature, and easily led (14:51).
  • George Atzerodt: Carriage painter, eager to prove his manhood, unlikeable and leak-prone.
  • Sam Arnold and Michael O’Laughlen: Respectable Baltimore friends.
  • John Surratt: Key courier for the Confederacy, brought strategic knowledge of escape routes and contacts.
  • Lewis Powell (alias Paine): Former Confederate, trusted, strong, and capable—a perfect soldier for Booth.
  • Mary Surratt: John’s mother, ran the D.C. boarding house that became the group’s headquarters.
  • Dr. Samuel Mudd: Later provided medical help as Booth attempted escape.
    • “Without Maryland, there is no story of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. It is amazing to me how much of an influence geography had in all of this…” (20:36, Michael Kaufman)

Geography’s Influence: Maryland and D.C.

• Maryland was a border state—Union, but with deep Southern sympathies, making it a “powder keg” (20:36).
• D.C. was geographically vulnerable, “right in the middle of enemy territory.”
• Families, even like Booth’s own, reflected the deep divides: some Southern-leaning, others Unionist. Booth’s brother Edwin was a strong Union man, close to Lincoln.

The Kidnap Plot That Morphed Into Murder

• The original abduction plot planned to snatch Lincoln along his route to the Soldier’s Home (26:36, Kaufman).
• Plans foiled; Lincoln’s habits changed, and the fall of Richmond and the Confederate surrender made abduction pointless.
  • “At that point, the kidnap scheme was totally impractical....if Booth continued to plot...then it certainly had to be about murder." (31:10, Michael Kaufman)
• Booth continually manipulated his group, alternating between plausible deniability and intentionally implicating others.

The Fateful Night: April 14, 1865

• Lincoln goes to Ford’s Theater—announcement in newspapers helps Booth finalize his act.
  • Grant, originally supposed to join, opts to visit his family—information on who will be present is public (34:02, Kaufman).
• Booth, with close ties to Ford’s Theater, easily moves through the theater, prepares his ambush:
  • He drills a peephole in the back of Lincoln’s box door, confirms the president’s presence, and secures the entryway with a bar (36:57).
    • “He could go anywhere he wanted. He just walked in and walked up toward the President's box...the fact that John Wilkes Booth was a familiar figure in the theater made it all that much easier for him to come and go.” (36:57, Michael Kaufman)

The Assassination and Aftermath

• Booth times the shot for a big laugh line in Our American Cousin to muffle the sound (40:49).

  • Fires small Derringer into Lincoln’s head at close range.
  • Stabs Major Rathbone as he tries to intervene, jumps to the stage, shouts, “Sic semper tyrannis!” (“Thus always to tyrants”) holding the bloody knife aloft (40:49).
    • “He raised himself up, held that bloody knife in his hand, raised it up over his head and said, ‘sic semper tyrannis’...” (41:42, Michael Kaufman)

• The audience is momentarily paralyzed, incredulous, thinking perhaps this is part of the play.

  • Even armed soldiers in the audience take time to process the shocking reality (42:19).

• Booth exits through the back of the theater, escapes into the night, triggering one of the most famous manhunts in American history (44:57, Wildman).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On why the assassination is so misunderstood:

  • _“It's a very, very complex piece of history, and that's why your book is so important." _(05:35, Don Wildman)

• On Booth’s manipulation:

  • _“He always came across as such a nice guy, but that was a weapon for him...I think he was a bit of a psychopath." _(11:36, Michael Kaufman)

• On the audience’s shock:

  • “Many of those people in the audience were soldiers, many of them armed...here comes the biggest violence of their lives, the most famous violence of their lives. And they can't move. They're dumbfounded.” (42:19, Don Wildman)

• On Booth’s easy access:

  • “You can look all you want, you'll never see any reference to guards or bodyguards in relation to Abraham Lincoln. At the time, people didn't wonder, how did Booth get in? Booth got in because he was famous.” (36:57, Michael Kaufman)

• On geography’s impact on the plot:

  • “Without Maryland, there is no story of Abraham Lincoln's assassination. It is amazing to me how much of an influence geography had in all of this.” (20:36, Michael Kaufman)

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Timeline and Timestamps of Major Segments

• [01:41] – Setting the scene at Ford’s Theater; Lincoln’s security lapse.
• [04:49] – Booth’s deep planning and influence on post-war politics.
• [06:16] – Booth’s year-long conspiracy and the prisoner exchange plot.
• [09:13] – The manipulative dynamics between Booth and his co-conspirators.
• [14:51] – Casting the “players” in Booth’s plot.
• [20:36] – Maryland’s critical geographic and political role.
• [23:01] – Divisions within the Booth family and movement across the North/South.
• [26:36] – Original kidnap plot: why and how it failed.
• [31:10] – Transition from abduction to assassination.
• [36:57] – Booth’s preparations at Ford’s Theater, including details of the Presidential box.
• [40:49] – The moment of the assassination: how it unfolded inside the box, Booth’s escape.
• [42:19] – Audience paralysis and delayed reaction to the assassination.
• [44:57] – Booth’s escape and transition to the national manhunt.

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Tone and Style

The episode is characterized by a dramatic, narrative approach—vividly re-staging the political tension, raw emotion, and eerie theatricality of Lincoln’s assassination. Wildman’s style is engaging and accessible, while Kaufman's expertise adds clarity and nuance to a complex historical event.

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For Further Listening

• The episode sets up future explorations of Booth’s flight and capture, the fate of the conspirators, and the meaning of Lincoln's death for American history and Reconstruction.
• Listeners are encouraged to seek out Michael Kaufman’s American Brutus for a deeper dive into the drama and personalities of these pivotal days.

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Summary prepared for listeners seeking a detailed yet concise understanding of the forces, personalities, and pivotal moments behind America’s most famous assassination.

Transcript

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[Don Wildman]

April 14, 1865. Ford's Theater is crowded tonight. An audience in high spirits, laughing uproariously, all caught up in the relief and excitement of the union's recent victory, thrilled to be sharing the evening with the President and First lady who've come along to enjoy the comedy. But one chair, right outside the door to the President's box sits empty. It should be occupied by a police officer, one John Frederick Parker, a member of Washington's early force, but a man with a long record of misconduct, drunkenness, sleeping on duty, even visiting brothels while in uniform. Tonight he's again derelict. Instead of guarding Lincoln's door, Parker has wandered off to watch the play from the gallery. At intermission, he joins the President's coachman and footman for a drink at the nearby Star Saloon. The lapse won't cost him his badge. But it will earn him a grim place in history as the guard who abandoned his post the fateful night of Lincoln's murder. Worse still, while Parker drinks, the assassin himself, John Wilkes Booth, is sitting just a few stools away, finishing his whiskey before stepping next door to commit his terrible act. Hey, everyone. Welcome to American history. Hit. I'm Don Wildman. Given the pinnacle that Abraham Lincoln had reached in April 1865, as President and savior of the United States, it's near impossible to imagine how low the nation must have fallen upon news of his murder. This was the first time an American president had been assassinated. Never mind he was the visionary leader who'd carried the country through the slog of civil war. Now, with a great man martyred, Americans were on their own, faced with the daunting task of binding the nation's wounds. Sadly, shockingly, the first step in that process would be rooting out a nasty infection, tracking down the president's killer and his nest of conspirators so that the healing could even begin. Today we have Michael Kaufman, author of American Brutus, a detailed account of the shooting of Abraham Lincoln and the capture of John Wilkes Booth, America's most notorious assassin. Michael Kaufman, my friend, welcome to American history. Hit.

[Michael Kaufman]

Well, thank you. It's great to be here.

[Don Wildman]

Dare say most Americans have little understanding of the complexities behind the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. It's entered into that sort of caricature state of history. You know, we've seen so many courier knives, shots of what happened, and as I just said in the intro, how linked the assassination is actually with the beginning of Reconstruction. Most Americans don't realize that how this was part of reuniting the country, a very unpleasant part of it. In so many ways, Lincoln's murder can really be seen as the first step in that process. Honestly, most in the south were as shocked and dismayed as up north, or at least many of them.

[Michael Kaufman]

Right. And, you know, the assassination affected almost everything that came afterward. And Abraham Lincoln was such an enormous figure in American history by that time, both north and south, they were all trying to jockey for position of. In the north, everybody wanted to be the inheritor of Lincoln's legacy. They all wanted to say, well, this is what Lincoln would have wanted in their pursuit of their own agenda for Reconstruction. And even in the south, they were all afraid of the retaliation that would come from association with John Wilkes Booth and the conspiracy. And that calmed a lot of them down and made them more conciliatory.

[Don Wildman]

You know, I want to let people off the Hook. Part of the reason that it has been so distilled down to simplicities is because it's a very, very complex piece of history, and that's why your book is so important. American Brutus. But let's start very generally and move towards specifics. We're one week from the surrender of Southern forces by Robert E. Lee at the Appomattox Courthouse, which took place on April 9th. The assassination's on April 14th. So it's natural to think of the assassination as this revenge killing sort of retribution, and it certainly was. But John Wilkes Booth had been plotting against Lincoln for more than a year and with a number of people. So tell me about this sort of web of intrigue that Booth had spun.

[Michael Kaufman]

John Wilkes Booth was enormously successful as an actor, and he was so great at manipulating people that when he had an idea, no matter how harebrained it may have seemed to other people, he could convince them that this was the way to go. And so he began a conspiracy a year before the assassination and in 1864, with some old boyhood friends. And the idea originally was to help the Confederacy by forcing the federal government to exchange prisoners of war. We've all seen those pictures of living skeletons, you know, coming back from places like Andersonville and in the South. They said, look, we can't do anything about this. We don't have food. We can't even feed our own armies. And. And it was a hu. Volatile issue at the time. So Booth told his friends that we can break the stalemate here. They're refusing to exchange prisoners as they used to do. And General Grant came in and said, we don't want to keep exchanging prisoners like we used to. It's going to be a bitter pill to swallow. But we have to stop the POW exchange. John Wilkes Booth told some of his friends, he goes, we have to get that prisoner exchange going again. The south looks really bad. We. When we see all these photographs of living skeletons coming back from places like Andersonville, It's a PR nightmare, of course. And when we can get the POW exchange going again, the south will get their soldiers back and they can go back into action again. And that would relieve a great deal of that manpower shortage. It sounded like a reasonable idea, and it was perfectly legal at the time to take hostages, believe it or not.

[Don Wildman]

There's some really incredible facts of life in those days, not the least of which is the accessibility to the U.S. president. I mean, you can kind of walk into the White House in those days, really. But sticking with the generalities at this time, 1864, going very badly in the winter for, you know, the, really the fall into the winter for the Southern forces. People are beginning to. The card they're playing right now is to try to get a ceasefire, try to sort of extend this war out so that the divided political forces in the north would finally agree that this thing should just be be called off and the south can just go on their merry way doing what they always wanted to do. So this is the game that Lincoln is playing. The big card that happens to be drawn is that his election in the October of the fall sort of seals the deal for all those anti war forces. And the man who's leading the Union through this conflict is still going to be in power. Lincoln. So that's really the change that happens for Booth and his web of intrigue. Who are these people that he's working with and how did he gather them?

[Michael Kaufman]

Well, initially, Booth got together with some friends from Baltimore, some old childhood friends. And their conversation might have struck anyone outside as being just drunken banter, you know, in a bar somewhere. But they were on the hook. They liked Booth. They were. They found it very persuasive. And initially those people, a guy named Michael Laughlin and Sam Arnold, signed on with him. They would later on find out that there were other people. And this is the thing that was never clear in any previous book. John Wilkes Booth had formed several different groups of people unknown to each other. Some of them were quasi confederates and others were just personal friends. They never knew about each other until a month before the assassination. And one of the things I did was try to examine very closely the relationship between Booth and each person in the plot. And I found that you can actually tell how much Booth trusted a person by how much we ended up knowing about that person. Some of them he threw to the wolves. If he didn't trust them, if he had no further use for them, we got plenty of information about them from the public record. If, on the other hand, John Wilkes Booth needed and valued and trusted a particular person, Confederate soldier named Lewis Powell, for example, nobody even inside the conspiracy, knew who this guy was. And historians to this day keep calling him Pain. That was one of many aliases that he had. None of the other conspirators knew who he was. They didn't know anything about him. That indicates to me that John Wilkes Booth trusted him very much and protected him.

[Don Wildman]

The original plan was not to kill Lincoln, as I understand it, it was to abduct him, to hold him hostage in exchange for the north to exchange the. The prisoners of war. The south needed men to continue this effort. How was that supposed to unfold? Lincoln was reelected in October, and they begin to plot this thing through. What was the plan? How would they do that?

[Michael Kaufman]

Historically, most people think that this was one plot that morphed directly into another or made an abrupt change at the last minute into a plot to kill. I think that, you know, Booth really had it in his head all along to kill Abraham Lincoln, but was using that initial plot to force the exchange of POWs. He used that to get people on the hook, so to speak. I noticed that in January of 1865, which was a few months before the assassination, the federal government resumed the POW exchange. And yet Booth did absolutely nothing to stop his plotting. So what's he planning to do at this point? His initial goal was already achieved, and he was very good at keeping that information away from his fellow conspirators. And so I think that it had a lot more to do with his own ego, with, okay, you know, they've stopped, and that's sort of anticlimactic, but I wanted to have a part in all of this. And so Booth keeps going, and he gets all of his conspirators, especially the ones he. He had learned not to trust so much. He gets them into this position where they're committed now legally, and if anything happens, they're all in as much trouble one way or another as Booth himself is. And he lets them all know that, again, he is such a master manipulator of people. And as I'm writing this book, I'm thinking to myself, you know, he always came across as such a nice guy, but that was a weapon for him. He. He used people in such a way that I. I think he. He was a bit of a psychopath. John Wilkes Booth used people to such an extent. At one point, he even told another person. He goes, that person, you know, is a coward, and I don't mind sacrificing him. I thought about that word sacrifice. You know, he was doing that to a lot of people. He was building up a case in their minds for their imprisonment or execution in the event that something should go wrong. And that's what kept all of these different people quiet about the plot, why it was able to succeed ultimately, and why it went for as long as it did without being detected.

[Don Wildman]

Vainglorious narcissist. How unusual in American history. The metaphor that is obvious here, screaming out is one of a play unfolding. I mean, here you have an actual matinee idol. This actor, John Wilkes Booth, who's famous in America for not such great acting, by the way. He was sort of a matinee idol, type B rate kind of guy. However, he's part of a legendary acting family. Even his father, but certainly his brother, Edwin Booth, who is, you know, a renowned Shakespearean actor. So he's smack in the middle of this world of the theater. So tell me about. Let's talk about this in terms of cast. Who's the cast of players that are part of this production that John Wilkes Booth is directing in his mind?

[Michael Kaufman]

Well, Booth has a friend from several years back named David Herold. He plays the fool. Harold is not a particularly stupid person, but he's extremely immature. In fact, his father had passed away the year before the assassination and left a will behind that says, under no circumstances should my son David have any. Anything to do with this will. It was said that when he worked for a pharmacist that he would switch prescriptions on people just for a joke. So David Herold was one of these people who was. Well, let's call him a useful idiot. But one of David Herold's chief contributions to the plot was that he brought another person into this, a man named George Atzerodt, who lived down in the country south of Washington. He was a carriage painter. He was very much a kindred spirit to Harold himself. He was a bit loose with the information he passed around. He had something to prove, and one of the things he always wanted to prove is that he was a man of action. And so Atzerodt was leaking information about the conspiracy left and right. He became an enormous headache for John Wilkes Booth and kept him on his toes and off guard for much of the time while the conspiracy developed. Booth had a couple of decent people in his plot from Baltimore, Michael Laughlin and Sam Arnold. They were respectable. He could hang out with them and not attract much attention. He had John Surratt, who was a person he had encountered along the way, who was a courier for the Confederate government, who used to run messages back and forth from Richmond, the Confederate capital, up into Montreal, Canada, where the Confederate government had a number of people working. The fact that John Surratt knew the way from Washington down to Richmond and from Washington up to Canada was very important for Booth because he needed an escape. And this is a guy who knew how to get from one place to the next and knew all the people along any possible route. The big coup, as far as Booth is concerned, was the almost accidental meeting with a man named Lewis Thornton Powell. He was a Confederate soldier who had fought under the Gray Ghost John Mosby in Northern Virginia. Powell was absolutely fearless. He was quiet, discreet, enormous, and very strong, and he would do whatever you told him to do. In short, Lewis Powell was the perfect soldier and he would become the perfect servant for John Wilkes Booth in his conspiracy.

[Don Wildman]

I'll be back with more American history after this short break.

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[Don Wildman]

So I'm counting 12345 about six people outside of John Wilkes Booth we've got David Herold John Surratt, Sam Arnold, George Atzerratt, Lewis Powell. That's five. History tells us there are two more, Mary Surratt and Samuel Mudd, who we'll talk about in a moment. Very important to this whole production, Wilkes Booth production is the backdrop of Maryland itself, the state of Maryland and its city, Baltimore. There. Maryland was an enigma. It was, on one hand a Union state, but on the other hand, very Southern leaning. Kind of a perfect place to sort of set this. The other aspect of this that's amazing to this day, really, is that Washington, D.C. sits in the south, the nation's capital. The Union capital is right smack in the middle of enemy territory. You've got Virginia on one side and Maryland on the other, which ostensibly is Union, but it really is so south leaning that it's almost the enemy.

[Michael Kaufman]

Without Maryland, there is no story of Abraham Lincoln's assassination. It is amazing to me how much of an influence geography had in all of this, because Maryland is south of the Mason Dixon line. It is a slave state. And in some ways, it is also as much like Pennsylvania to the north as it is to Virginia to the South. We've always had a tendency to look at the Civil War as being north versus south, black versus white, all that, and it's not that simple. When you get into an area that is neither really north nor really south, you get a lot of mixing, and that's a powder keg, because you have families then and friends and tight little networks of people who go off in different directions. You can't tell whether somebody's a Northerner or a Southerner just by looking at them. And in Maryland, you often saw quite literally the brother against brother phenomenon. As a matter of fact, George Atzerodt, one of the conspirators, had a brother who was a federal detective. There were some friends of Michael Laughlin and other people in Baltimore who were federal detectives. And George Atzerodt's own brother was a federal detective. These are all Baltimore people, and yet they're all mixing together with this very volatile sort of stew of suspicion that they have of one another. And that made Maryland a much more intense, much more emotional, visceral struggle for many of these people, because the war was in their face all the time. But what throws people off is that the war was generally not fought in Maryland. And so it's an underground kind of a war.

[Don Wildman]

It's interesting also to note how permeable Washington, D.C. was. I mean, it being between Virginia and Maryland, it was easily accessed by spies, by Confederate Couriers, all alike. I mean, people were in and out of that place. It's one of the great ironies of the Civil War, in my opinion. I'm curious, though, Booth being part of such a famous family, was his family Southern leaning? I mean, did he have pressures within his family about this? Did his brother approve?

[Michael Kaufman]

The Booths were a typical Maryland family. They were divided. The oldest brother was Southern leaning. John Wilkes and his younger brother Joseph were Southern leaning. But Edwin was a very strong Unionist and very much favored by Abraham Lincoln and William Seward, whom he had met personally. But they went in both directions, and they had to declare a truce whenever they were going to get together and agree not to talk politics, because, you know, it was so explosive at the time, even among themselves.

[Don Wildman]

Booth had given up acting sort of in this last year of his life there because he becomes so active in his conspiracy, he's all over the country and then ends up in Montreal, which is a hive of Confederacy.

[Michael Kaufman]

That's right. John Wilkes Booth traveled a lot as an actor, and when he went from one city to the next, it was no big deal to him at all. He knew the roots, he knew all about travel, and he didn't raise any suspicions at all when he went from one city to the next. So when Booth was developing his conspiracy, he would travel from one place to another, and it wouldn't attract any attention at all. If you're looking closely at the record, he's not going up there or out there or down there to perform on a stage anywhere. He's just going there and he's meeting people and he's building a network of sorts.

[Don Wildman]

You mention in the book that he has his sister on notice that people may be coming to the door asking for Dr. Booth. And the reason is because he was smuggling quinine, which was a valuable fluid in the South. Why was that? I'm just curious. I read that and wondered.

[Michael Kaufman]

Well, the importance of John Wilkes Booth's claims about doing work for the Confederacy can't be overstated. He told his sister that he was smuggling quinine for the Confederacy. That was what they were using to counteract certain diseases that they were getting in the Deep South. And in fact, Asia Booth Clark, in her book, she says that her brother showed her the calluses on his hands from nights of rowing and so on, going across rivers into the Confederacy to do all of this cloak and dagger business for the Southern government. But it's not that hard to go and track John Wilkes Booth from one place to the next and to know where he was Almost every single day of the war. His sister said that he told her in November 1864 that he had gotten his hands all calloused from rowing across the river to smuggle quinine into the South. Well, we know where he was and he hadn't been anywhere near the south and probably five or six months at least. So those are long lasting calluses or, or more likely, as I tend to see it, he was just blowing smoke at people. He was telling people he was doing things for the south and he really wasn't yet. He was just thinking through what he was going to do, but creating for himself the sort of image of a person who was making his own contribution in a way that, well, I can't tell you or I'd have to kill you.

[Don Wildman]

All right, so we have the background of the play. The action really starts with the reelection of Lincoln in the fall of 1864. At that point, they hatch a plan to kidnap him. Take me through that and tell me how it failed.

[Michael Kaufman]

John Wilkes Booth initially told his two friends, Sam Arnold and Michael Loughlin, that they would capture Abraham Lincoln. And that was important, the word capture, because it was perfectly legal. And Abraham Lincoln was a man of some consistency in his habits. And one thing that people all knew about him at the time is that he regularly went out of the city and up to a place called the Soldier's Home, following a predictable route and so on. And he didn't like having guards or anything, so he was going by himself up there. When John Wilkes Booth realized that, he told his friends, well, what we can do is meet his carriage as he's on his way to the Soldier's Home, and, you know, point our guns at the driver and take Lincoln out of the carriage and take him down through Southern Maryland, which was very friendly territory to them. Take him across the Potomac river into Virginia and then take him over to Richmond where the Confederate government can use him as a hostage to force a policy on the POWs.

[Don Wildman]

But this was a plan that Jefferson Davis, for one, had heard about and rejected. Right. The Confederates didn't want to do this.

[Michael Kaufman]

You know, in recent years, it seems like the trend has been to see more Confederate involvement in all of this. I don't think Jefferson Davis was so foolhardy that, that he would have endorsed something like this. And all of the sources that I came across show that a good many people think this was a harebrained scheme and they wanted nothing to do with it.

[Don Wildman]

They do have a date in March of 1865 to kidnap Lincoln. He's going to go see a show or something like that, but he changes things up, and they can't kidnap him, so the plan is altered. Am I right?

[Michael Kaufman]

On March 17, John Wilkes Booth found out that Abraham Lincoln was going to go to Ford's Theater. And it wasn't the road out to the Soldier's Home. It wasn't an isolated place. It was quite the opposite, in fact. But he came up with the idea of capturing Lincoln and taking him right out of the theater box, lowering him to the stage and carrying him out the back door of the theater. Now, how anybody fell for that, I have no idea, because even on the face of it, it's ridiculous. But when Booth expected Lincoln to show up, he gathered all of his people together in such a public way that it just didn't make any sense to me. Unless you realize, of course, that he wanted to be seen with all of these guys, and he wanted to look like he was all poised and ready to strike out against Lincoln. Well, Lincoln didn't show up where they expected him to show up. They went out to where they could lie in wait for Lincoln, and they found out afterwards that Lincoln had gone over to the National Hotel instead. Now, the National Hotel is where Booth lived, actually. It's so ironic. And at that point, a month before the assassination, he says to the others, well, I guess that's it. We'll never get another chance to do anything. And. And history sort of records that as being the end of the kidnap conspiracy. Anything that happens after that is now a murder conspiracy.

[Don Wildman]

How are they meeting? I mean, this is days long before the efficient way to call each other and so forth. They have a safe house in D.C. right.

[Michael Kaufman]

One of the conspirators was John Surratt, the Confederate courier, and his mother lived on H Street in Washington. She ran a boarding house there, and people would come and go at all time of the day and night, and the question was whether Mrs. Surratt, Mary Surratt, knew exactly what was going on or had just learned to not ask questions. Anyway, John Surratt's mother, Mary, became very close to John Wilkes Booth, who stopped by her house quite frequently. One or two of the others came by as well. And so the Surratt boarding house in Washington came to be known as the headquarters of the John Wilkes Booth conspiracy.

[Don Wildman]

How do we morph from kidnapping to murder? I mean, I suppose the pivotal event is the surrender of the forces, right?

[Michael Kaufman]

Robert E. Lee's surrender to General Grant on April 9 was certainly a game changer, but I could put it back Even before that, the previous week, Richmond had fallen to the federal troops and the entire Confederate government was on the run. They weren't in Richmond anymore. Where are you going to take Abraham Lincoln if you capture him? At that point, the kidnap scheme was totally impractical. And so if John Wilkes Booth continued to plot about anything at all, then it certainly had to be about murder, because he certainly couldn't have pulled off any kind of a practical result from a kidnapping.

[Don Wildman]

I'll be back with more American history after this short break.

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[Don Wildman]

The surrender of forces at Appomattox obviously changes everything. Dancing in the streets in Washington D.C. parties everywhere. And that is part of what prompts the show and that Abraham Lincoln goes to on April 14. It is in the spirit of celebration that he decides to go see Our American Cousin. A lousy play, I'm sorry to say, a bad comedy, very much in the fashion in those days. And you know, it's just to sort of loosen the collar and go to to see something fun with him and his wife. Grant is supposed to come with him, so says the newspapers, even along with his wife, they do not go. He's not feeling well. And so Lincoln and Mary Lincoln go in the company of another couple who they don't know very well and a military officer. This is well publicized. It is announced that the President will be at Ford's Theater on that night. So this is what really triggers, no pun intended, John Wilkes Booth's plan.

[Michael Kaufman]

Well, the sequence of events in the last two days really was laid out very well in advance for anybody who's reading the newspapers. It was assumed that Abraham Lincoln would get out and about in the city on the night of Thursday the 13th, because that was supposed to be the night of the Grand Illumination, the big official federal government's celebration of basically, for all practical purposes, the end of the war. And so if Abraham Lincoln didn't get out and about and mix with the public, that would certainly look a little bit odd. But Lincoln was not feeling well. What most people don't know is that John Wilkes Booth assumed as well that Lincoln would be out there, and he was poised and ready to do something on that night. Because Lincoln stayed at home that night, he felt somewhat obligated to get out in the public the following. And he invited, at his wife's insistence, he invited General Grant, who had just come into town after Appomattox, and he said, well, my wife is going to have a little theater party. You want to go with us? And General Grant said, oh, no, I got to get back home. Grant's home of record at the time was Burlington, New Jersey. His kids were there. He hadn't seen them in a long time. And Abraham Lincoln certainly understood, you know, you've. You've done a tremendous job. You certainly ought to be able to go home and see your family. So he didn't argue the point. However, he was probably not aware that the newspapers had already said that General Grant was going to be there with him. And John Wilkes Booth certainly saw that. John Wilkes Booth had very close ties to Ford's Theater. In fact, the same people who built Ford's theater had built the house Booth grew up in. It's a very tight community, and word travels fast. And John Wilkes Booth certainly knew by early in the afternoon of April 14th that the Lincolns were going to come to Ford's Theater to watch Our American Cousin. He thought that Grant was going to be there as well. But, you know, Grant had better things to do.

[Don Wildman]

Okay, so John Wilkes Booth is going to act. His biggest scene ever. I've been in that community in the past in my life, and I know that these places are homes away from homes, these theaters that actors act in. So he was able to walk into Ford's Theater as if it was his living room. In fact, he picked up. Normally picked up his mail at Ford's Theater. So truly a home Away from home. So seeing John Wilkes Booth walk into Ford's Theater, especially on this big night when the President is coming, would be no unusual thing. The man was famous. So when people see him come up into the dress circle of that theater, people are only delighted and excited that he's there. He has a whole different agenda.

[Michael Kaufman]

John Wilkes Booth, being a famous actor, of course, had the run of the place at Ford's Theater. He knew the Ford family very well. He could go anywhere he wanted. He just walked in and walked up toward the President's box. Nowadays, we think, oh, there must have been guards out there. You can look all you want. You'll never see any reference to guards or bodyguards in relation to Abraham Lincoln. At the time, people didn't wonder, how did Booth get in? Booth got in because he was famous. He got in because, well, there's the door. Open it up and go in. Anybody who was prominent enough and had the nerve could just do that as well. But the fact that John Wilkes Booth was a familiar figure in the theater made it all that much easier for him to come and go as he chose in the theater and not to arouse any kind of suspicions about it. The presidential box in Ford's Theater was very oddly shaped space that was right above the stage, and it was stage left and very angular, odd space that had enough room in it for a couple of chairs and a sofa. Abraham Lincoln sat right inside the door to the box. His wife sat in a small chair next to him, and next to her was a woman by the name of Clara Harris, whose father was a US senator. Ms. Harris's fiance, Henry Rathbone, an army major, sat on the sofa at the far side of the box. Now, the box was originally two separate boxes, but you could take a partition out and make them into one bigger box. And that's what they always did when Abraham Lincoln was there. He'd been there so many times. I mean, there was a routine. Pretty much everybody associated with the theater knew exactly where Lincoln was going to be and how the box was going to be set up and so on, because that's what they always did. The box could be reached by a little passageway. When you go into that passageway, you'll see two doors ahead. The door on the left was right behind Abraham Lincoln. He was sitting in a big rocker just on the other side of that door. On the day of the assassination, a few hours ahead of time, Booth went into the passageway behind the President's box and had drilled a hole in the door right behind where Abraham Lincoln normally sat. And so he could look in there to be sure that, in fact, it was Lincoln, because there were so many surprises in those days about who shows up and who doesn't. And so he had prepared all of that. And he had also put a wooden bar in the passageway so he could bar the door shut. And anybody who wanted to try and get in and pursue him would simply be locked out. So he had done some preparation. And this is one of the things that he was able to do because of his easy access to the place. And so it clearly shows all the premeditation that was going into this a few hours ahead of time.

[Don Wildman]

So let me stage this scene. John Wilkes Booth gets inside of the box. He's looking through the hole. Meanwhile, our American cousin is being acted on stage. He knows all the lines of this play. He's probably acted in it, or at least read it many times. He knows the timings that he's looking for. And there is one line coming up late in the play that he knows will get a big laugh. At that moment, he can make his move. That's going to cover a sound of the shot. And so when there comes a big laugh, he enters there and shoots Lincoln, who he's already seen through the hole in the door. Take me through. What happens then?

[Michael Kaufman]

Well, Booth had stolen quietly into the box. Nobody realized he was there. And he stepped toward the President and almost point blank fired a small Derringer into the back of Abraham Lincoln's head. Lincoln, sitting in his rocker, slumped forward. And because of all the laughter and the element of surprise, you know, people didn't quite get what was going on. And there was this sort of momentary paralysis. Henry Rathbone was sitting in the box as well. And he jumped up and tried to grapple with Booth. And Booth pulled out a knife and struck Rathbone across the inside of his arm and. And tried to stab him to death. Rathbone was grievously injured by this knife wound. And Booth pushed past him, got up on the railing that was beautifully decorated with flags and festoons and all of that business, and he leaped down onto the stage. That's 12ft down. And Booth had done that sort of thing many times before. He was known as a very athletic man. And when Booth leaped down to the stage, he raised himself up, held that bloody knife in his hand, raised it up over his head and said, sic semper tyrannis. Thus always to tyrants, which he thought was going to explain everything to anybody who's paying attention.

[Don Wildman]

And as he screams this out, we have a shocked audience watching something they don't even know occurred. The gunshot was covered by their own laughter, pretty much. And then it seems almost to everyone in the theater, like this is part of the event, like this is part of the show. Especially with the President there, maybe something special was happening. And then down comes John Wilkes Booth, of all people. I mean, that's like Robert Redford jumping out of the balcony onto a stage. You'd think it's in the play, for God's sakes. And under the conditions they were in right then, celebrating the South's surrender, one can assume or one can forgive anyone in that audience for sitting there dumbfounded. Many of those people in the audience were soldiers, many of them armed, many of them had guns on them. These were men who in many cases had been in battle. I mean, they were ready to go in the face of violence. But here comes the biggest violence of their lives, the most famous violence of their lives. And they can't move. They're dumbfounded. And the man screams in front of them, the famous declaration, down with tyranny. And then off he runs into the flats. Even at that point, they think, that's just an exit. That's just the end of the play. And then suddenly, reality hits them.

[Michael Kaufman]

You can imagine how all of these soldiers felt. They're sitting right there. They are close enough to have intervened. They're heavily armed in some cases. And this murder took place right in front of them. And they just sat there. That was one of the dominant themes of the eyewitness accounts that came up afterwards. The two dominant themes, as a matter of fact, was, oh, my God, I wish I had realized sooner what was going on. And the other thing was that they had no idea what was going on. They thought, oh, something must have fallen, some, you know, set piece or one. One of the other things that most eyewitnesses were thinking was something must have fallen backstage, some set piece or whatever. It was some banging noise. Even John Ford, the owner of the theater, his brother was in the box office and he looks out and he sees John Wilkes Booth leaping to the stage. Is John Wilkes Booth crazy? I mean, you know, that attention getting or, you know, prank or whatever it is that he's doing out there, that's. That's going to mess things up for us. But it was not unusual in those days to improvise in theatrical production. And the only people who probably knew this wasn't a part of the play were the people who were in the play. And they're saying, to themselves. Well, wait a minute, we didn't rehearse.

[Don Wildman]

This again, though it could have been improvised. However, the darkest possible thing has happened. A great man has been murdered and the killer escapes out the back of the theater into the dark, where his horse has been held for him by a conspirator, perhaps, but he has passed it on to some kid who John Wilkes Booth and slugs over the head, jumps onto his horse and gallops off into the night. This is where the second act begins. Thanks for listening to American History hit. You know, every week we release new episodes, two new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays from mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements to some of the biggest battles across the centuries. Don't miss an episode by hitting like and follow. You help us out, which is great, but you'll also be reminded when our shows are on. And while you're at it, please share with a friend. American History hit with me, Don Wildman. So grateful for your support. Thanks so much.

[Michael Kaufman]

Foreign.

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