How Did The Failure Of John Wilkes Booth's Assassination

John Wilkes Booth

John Wilkes Boothe goes down in history as the first person to assassinate his very own president, which was president Abraham Lincoln. During his youth he was considered to be strikingly handsome and attracted many people. He decided to try stage at an early stage, but he refused to act out the right parts. In 1860 he was approved and achieved recognition across the country and played to audiences. In 1863 Booth had a respiratory problem and was forced to leave the stage (John Wilkes). After that in his free time he started to have a, “...a romantic ‘conspiracy’ to abduct President Lincoln and deliver him to Richmond for a ransom of peace or an exchange of Confederate prisoners,”(John Wilkes). John was the only one in his

family that really cared about the South.

The civil war he believed it was a war between southern freedom and Northern tyranny (John Wilkes). Booth then got together a group of six people to help take down the president. He actually had two attempts to assassinate the president, but the first one failed because the president failed to appear at the event. After that Booth got even more frustrated at the president and wanted to assassinate him even more after that. As time went on Booth got even more and more frustrated with Lincoln and eventually learned that, “..at noon on April 14 that Lincoln would attend Laura Keene's performance of Our American Cousin at Ford's Theater in Washington that evening,”(John Wilkes). When Booth first thought this up he also wanted the vice president and the secretary of state to be assassinated also, but he failed to carry out these murders. Once the President was inside Booth came in and barricaded the door so that Lincoln would be boxed in. After that, “At about ten o'clock Booth entered the theater, shot Lincoln, and jumped to the stage, shouting "Sic semper tyrannis! (Thus ever to tyrants!) The South is avenged!"” (John Wilkes). When Booth jumped up onto the stage he broke his left leg and ended up dragging himself out of the theater and

rode away on a horse. After traveling for a while the pain slowed him down and was forced to see a doctor. Once he got to a doctor, “Dr. Samuel A. Mudd set the leg and fed the fugitives,”(John Wilkes). After he was fully healed he and his followers tried to cross the Potomac and ended up reaching the farm of Richard H. Garrett. Pursuers that were hunting for Booth and his men found them in the barn on April 26. It is said that one of his men came out and surrendered, but Booth did not.

The pursuers then set the barn a flame and burned everything down, but someone said that they saw Booth trying to escape. So one of the pursuers ended up shooting him. Some believe though that, “His figure was glimpsed briefly just as a shot was fired,”(John Wilkes). In the end it was unclear if Booth was either killed or committed suicide. For the other men that worked for booth they each received different sentences. Four of the men received death sentences, the doctor received a life sentence in prison and so did two other of Booth’s accomplices. After that one of the accomplices died and the other one and the doctor were pardoned by President Johnson. Booth’s last words was, "Tell Mother ... I died for my country,"(John Wilkes) Later in life, actors portrayed Booth in such programs as The Hunt for John Wilkes Booth (2007) and The American Experience episode "The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln" (2009) on television. Booth was included in the 2011 film The Conspirator, directed by Robert Redford; director Steven Spielberg was scheduled to release a film about the life and death of the president, Lincoln, in 2012. A number of books, among them Right or Wrong, God Judge Me: The Writings of John Wilkes Booth,

have been published. John Wilkes Booth goes down in history as the assassin of Abraham Lincoln.