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The assassination of Abraham Lincoln, one of the last major events in the American Civil War, took...

The assassination of Abraham Lincoln, one of the last major events in the American Civil War, took place on Good Friday, April 14, 1865, when President Abraham Lincoln was shot while attending a performance of Our American Cousin at Ford's Theatre with his wife and two guests. Lincoln's assassin, actor and Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth, had also plotted with fellow conspirators, Lewis Powell and George Atzerodt to kill William H. Seward (then Secretary of State) and Vice President Andrew Johnson respectively. Booth hoped to create chaos and overthrow the Federal government by assassinating Lincoln, Seward, and Johnson. Although Booth succeeded in killing Lincoln, the larger plot failed. Seward was attacked, but recovered from his wounds, and Johnson's would-be assassin fled Washington, D.C. upon losing his nerve. Ulysses S. Grant , the commanding general of all the Union's armies, suspended the exchange of prisoners-of-war in March 1864. This decision cut off a badly needed source of reinforcement for the outnumbered, manpower-starved South. John Wilkes Booth, a Confederate sympathizer, formulated a plot to kidnap Lincoln and take him south, to hold him hostage and