Booth’s attack is the only one that succeeds. At ten o’clock, during a line in the play “Our American Cousin” that provokes laughter, the actor fires a ball from point-blank range into the back of Lincoln’s skull near his left ear. The bullet lodges behind the President’s right eye and he slumps forward losing consciousness. When Major Rathbone stands to confront the assassin, Booth slashes him in the left forearm before leaping from the box some twelve feet, onto the stage.
Photography Book
The President invites several guests to accompany him, including General Grant, but all have conflicts for the evening. In the end, Major Henry Rathbone and his fiancé, Clara Harris, sit with the Lincolns in their private box to the right of the stage.
Abraham Lincoln
The war has taken a terrible toll on the president’s health, both mentally and physically. His face shows that he is aging rapidly, and modern medicine suspects that he is dying of a rare disease known today as multiple endocrine neoplasia (type 2B), with cancerous tumors of the thyroid and adrenal glands. But disease will not kill him; rather he becomes one more victim of the war’s violence.
Lincoln heads back to Washington from Richmond in a celebratory mood, and decides to accompany Mary to a play at Ford’s Theater on Good Friday night, April 14, 1865.
The lax security plays directly into the hands of 27 year old John Wilkes Booth, a famous stage actor and Confederate sympathizer who vows to kill Lincoln after hearing that he plans to allow blacks to vote in future elections. Together with fellow ympathizers, Booth lays out a plot for April 14 that has him shooting Lincoln, while Lewis Powell murders Secretary of State, Henry Seward, George Atzerodt attacks Vice-President Andrew Johnson, and Michael O’Laughlen goes after General Grant.
Lincoln is carried out of the theater and across the street to the Peterson boarding house, where he is laid diagonally on a short bed and attended by Dr. Charles Leale. It is immediately obvious that the wound is mortal, and the President gradually slips away. Surgeon General Joseph Barnes agrees hope is gone, and for the next nine hours visitors flock into the room to pay their final respects. Lincoln dies at 7:22am on April 15, and Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, offers a final pronouncement: “now he belongs to the ages.”
Standing there in astonishment is leading actress, Laura Keane, whose flowing dress will end up stained with the President’s blood. Booth catches a spur in the bunting below the box, and breaks his left leg when he lands on the stage. He proceeds to shout out “Sic Semper Tyrannis” (“thus always to tyrants”) , the Virginia state motto, before exiting the theater and riding off to escape.