<u>Lincoln's Assasination:</u>
-The assassination of Abraham Lincoln took place on April 14, 1865 around 22:25 in Washington, DC, when the American Civil War was coming to an end. Although he initially survived the shooting, the injuries received were of such severity that he died the next day, at 7:22. The incident occurred five days after the commanding general of the Army of Northern Virginia, Robert E. Lee, surrendered his troops to General Ulysses S. Grant and the Army of the Potomac. Lincoln was the first president of the United States to be assassinated.
The attack was planned and carried out by the actor and sympathizer of the Confederate cause John Wilkes Booth, as part of a larger conspiracy aimed at gathering the remaining Confederate troops to continue fighting. Booth recruited several accomplices, David Herold, Lewis Powell and George Atzerodt, to whom he commissioned the murder of Secretary of State William H. Seward and Vice President Andrew Johnson. With this triple murder, Booth hoped to create chaos and overthrow the Union government.
The sixteenth president of the United States Abraham Lincoln was shot in the head while attending the performance of the piece Our American Cousin by Tom Taylor, at the Ford theater in Washington D.C., in company of his wife and two guests. While Lincoln's murder was successful, the rest of the plot failed: Powell only managed to hurt Seward, who survived, while Atzerodt, in charge of Johnson's murder, panicked and fled Washington without even attempting to attack him.
After the attack the army organized the persecution of the murderer. Powell was arrested on April 17, 1865 and Atzerodt, on April 20. Booth and David Herold, after having fled the scene of the crimes, met again in Maryland and managed to escape their persecutors until April 26. Surrounded by the army, Herold surrendered, but Booth refused to do so and was shot down. They also arrested several suspects. Finally, a military court tried seven men and one woman, Mary Surratt, from May 9, 1865. On June 30, the court found them all guilty and sentenced four of them to the death penalty. Despite the irregularities of the trial, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton did not heed the clemency petitions and the suspects were executed by hanging on July 7, 1865.
