Assassination of Abraham Lincoln

On 14 April 1865, actor and Confederate sympathiser John Wilkes Booth shot President Abraham Lincoln during a performance at Ford’s Theatre in Washington. Lincoln died the following morning.

Booth’s associates attempted or planned attacks on Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William Seward. Federal authorities launched a large manhunt, and Booth was killed in Virginia on 26 April.

This context supports fiction about Washington at the end of the Civil War, political conspiracy, theatre communities, federal detectives and the shock that followed the murder of the president.