Abraham Lincoln (1809 - 1865)
Lincoln's death bed in Petersen House
Presidential box in Ford's Theatre
Funeral procession in New York - one of the children in the window on the left is believed to be a young Theodore Roosevelt
April 15th 1865: Abraham Lincoln dies
On this day in 1865, after being shot the previous day, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln died. Lincoln had overseen the American Civil War since 1861, and had furthered the abolition of slavery by issuing his Emancipation Proclamation and encouraging the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. Almost a week after the Confederacy’s surrender to the Union forces at Appomattox, Confederate sympathiser John Wilkes Booth shot the President while he was watching ‘Our American Cousin’ at Ford’s Theatre in Washington D.C. Booth shot Lincoln in the head at point blank range, and whilst Lincoln was taken across the street to Petersen House the wound was clearly fatal and after a nine hour coma he died at 7.22am. Booth was soon tracked down and killed, and Lincoln was widely mourned in the North as a great leader, while the nation was shocked at the first presidential assassination. Lincoln’s Vice President, Andrew Johnson, was swiftly sworn in as seventeenth President of the United States.
“Now he belongs to the ages.”
- Secretary of War Edwin Stanton after Lincoln’s death
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