Portal:Criminal justice/Selected biography/6
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John Wilkes Booth (May 10, 1838 – April 26, 1865) was an American stage actor, who assassinated Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President of the United States, at Ford's Theater in Washington, D.C. on April 14, 1865. Lincoln died the next day from a single gunshot wound to the back of the head, becoming the first American president to be assassinated. Booth was a member of the prominent 19th century Booth family of actors from Maryland. He was also a Confederate sympathizer and expressed vehement dissatisfaction with the South's defeat in the Civil War. He opposed Lincoln's proposal to extend voting rights to recently emancipated slaves. Booth and a group of co-conspirators led by him planned to kill Abraham Lincoln, Vice President Andrew Johnson, Secretary of State William Seward, and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton in a desperate bid to help the tottering Confederacy's cause. Although Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia had surrendered four days earlier, Booth believed the war was not yet over since Confederate General Joseph Johnston's army was still fighting the Union Army under General William Tecumseh Sherman. Of the conspirators, only Booth was successful in carrying out his part of the plot. Following the shooting, Booth fled by horseback to southern Maryland and eventually to a farm in rural northern Virginia, where he was tracked down and killed by Union soldiers two weeks later. Several of the other conspirators were tried and hanged shortly thereafter.
