Abraham Lincoln, History within itself...

We all know of Abe Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States of America. Most people know of the assassination that occurred in 1865. However, not everyone knows everything that happened or who even killed him.

On April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth, a confederate sympathizer killed President Lincoln by shooting him while he was attending a play at Ford's Theatre in D.C. This was only five days after the ending of the American Civil War.

Abe Lincoln

The original plot was to actually kidnap the President and take him to Richmond, the confederate capital. On March 20, 1865, the day that they had planned the kidnapping, Lincoln failed to show up where Booth and his six fellow helpers were waiting for him.

Two weeks after that, Richmond fell to Union Forces. After all this happening, John Booth, came up with an idea to help some of the confederates. He was going to kill the President of the United States.

John Booth

Booth had learned that Lincoln was to attend the play the evening of April 14. His plan was to assassinate Lincoln, Vice President, Andrew Johnson, and Secretary of the State, William H. Seward. He figured, if they were all gone, that the their government would have no choice, but to surrender.

Lincoln was in a private box above the stage with his wife Mary, an army officer named Henry Rathbone and Rathbone’s fiancé, Clara Harris, the daughter of New York Senator Ira Harris. At 10:15 Booth slipped into the box and fired his .44 caliber single-shot derringer into the back of Lincoln's head. Then he had stabbed Rathbone in the shoulder as he was going toward to check on Lincoln after hearing the horrid shot. Booth jumped to the stage from the box, breaking his leg and yelled, "Sic semper tyrannis!"

Everyone, at first, thought it was all part of the act until they heard the scream of the first lady. Then they knew that it was all very real. Booth escaped the theater on horseback. A doctor arrived immediately. Lincoln was paralyzed and having a hard time breathing. Soldiers came and moved him into a house across the street. There, a surgeon came and stated that he would not be able to make it through the night even with surgery. Lincoln was pronounced dead at 7:22am.

On April 26, Union troops surrounded a Virginia farmhouse where Booth was hiding out and set fire to it, hoping to flush the fugitive out. This did not work,  Booth remained inside. As the blaze intensified, a sergeant shot Booth in the neck, allegedly because the assassin had raised his gun as if to shoot. Carried out of the building alive, he barley lived for three hours, then gazing at his hands he uttered his last words, "Useless, useless.”
Four of Booth’s co-conspirators were convicted for their part in the assassination and executed by hanging on July 7, 1865. They included David Herold and Mary Surratt, the first woman put to death by the federal government.

The Lincoln Memorial stands at the west end of the National Mall as a neoclassical monument to the 16th President. The memorial, designed by Henry Bacon, after ancient Greek temples, stands 190 feet long, 119 feet wide, and almost 100 feet high. It is surrounded by a peristyle of 38 fluted Doric columns, one for each of the thirty six states in the Union at the time of Lincoln's death, and two columns in-antis at the entrance behind the colonnade.
I love listening to this story, Abe Lincoln was one of my favorite presidents and i feel very sad but yet interested in his life story. And even John Booth, sometimes i would just like to ask him, what was going through his mind when he did it.
The president’s corpse was taken to the White House, and on April 18 it was carried to the Capitol rotunda to lay in state on a catafalque. On April 21, Lincoln's body was boarded onto a train that conveyed it to Springfield, Illinois, where he had lived before becoming president. Tens of thousands of Americans lined the railroad route and paid their respects to their fallen leader during the trains solemn progression through the North. Lincoln and his son, Willie, who died in the White House of typhoid fever in 1862, were interred on May 4, 1865, at Oak Ridge Cemetery, near Springfield.

Lincoln Memorial

http://www.history.com/topics/abraham-lincoln-assassination