ABRAHAM LINCOLN’S ASSASSINATION: BEFORE AND AFTER
Johnny Fifles
2009, 8 October, Thor’s Day
English 1010
Causal Analysis
Final Draft
Abraham Lincoln was the U.S. President, and the very first to be assassinated while in
office. He was shot from behind on Friday, April 14, 1865, by John Wilkes Booth, a
Southerner sympathizer, in the Ford Theater in Washington, D.C. at the presence of
Lincoln’s wife, Mary Todd Lincoln.
What was behind it? Lincoln made some enemies from the South through the
Emancipation Proclamation. It declared all slaves owned by the Confederate States of
America to be free because none of the Confederate States returned to the Union on
January 1, 1863. The Proclamation called for the emancipation of all four million slaves
in the Confederate States and sought an end to slavery once and for all.
them conspired to kill the President, and John Wilkes Booth was one of them.
John Wilkes Booth was friends with Thomas Gorsuch, a slave owner from the
Southern United States. On September 11, 1851, he went to the town of Christiana,
Pennsylvania, to collect his slaves. Nonetheless, the slaves and townspeople resisted.
This encounter turned into a heated riot that ended with Gorsuch’s murder. The South
expected that Gorsuch’s murderer would be convicted of murder. Unfortuntely for them,
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Abraham Lincoln Biography Abraham Abraham Lincoln Biography Essay, Research Paper Abraham Lincoln was born February 12, 1809, in a log cabin near Hodgenville, Kentucky. He was the son of Thomas and Nancy Hanks Lincoln, and he was named for his paternal grandfather. Thomas Lincoln was a carpenter and farmer. Both of Abraham's parents were members of a Baptist congregation that had separated from ...
the killers were found not guilty, a verdict that angered the South into seceding from the
Union.
John Wilkes Booth plotted Lincoln’s death. He believed that Lincoln’s death would
create enough chaos to distract everyone while the Confederacy would overthrow the
United States government, with the intention of keeping the Confederate States
independent from the rule of the Union. When Booth shot Lincoln, though, he was
proven wrong.
The consequences of Lincoln’s assassination were very ghastly and devastating for
the North and South. Booth ran into a warehouse after he killed Lincoln and was later
killed when Union troops tried to capture him. Worse yet, the Reconstruction process
was slower that Lincoln had thought it would go. If Lincoln were still alive, the
Reconstruction process would go much quicker. Then, the Southern states would have
had a full pardon for all their war crimes. In other words, the Civil War between the
Northern and Southern United States of America would have ended sooner.
Unfortunately, the Civil War and Reconstruction were prolonged because Lincoln was
assassinated at the Ford Theater.
Lincoln’s wife and sons were devasted by his assassination. Mary Todd Lincoln was
widowed, and their sons did not name any of their children “Abraham” after the late
President. An exception was Abraham’s grandson, Abraham “Jack” Lincoln II, the only
son of Robert Todd Lincoln, who died of blood poisoning.
Most Northerners hated the Southerners because Lincoln died at the hands of a
Southerner sympathizer. At first, many disapproved of Lincoln’s actions as President,
but when news of Lincoln’s murder emerged, they joined mobs who tarred and
feathered some Southerner sympathizers, tied others to railroad tracks, and beat most
of them to death without mercy, without remorse, or without sympathy. A few, if any,
Northerners rejoiced in Lincoln’s death, while Southerners condemned Lincoln’s
assassination at the hands of John Wilkes Booth.
Radical Republican s declared that Lincoln actually hated the Southern States for its
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secession and wanted to punish all of them. Accordingly, they forced Andrew Johnson,
Lincoln’s vice president and, subsequently, the new U.S. president, to punish the South
under pain of impeachment for abuse of power.
Most people involved in the conspiracy to kill Abraham Lincoln went to trial. Only four
conspirators received the death sentence by hanging: Lewis Powell, who was hired to
kill William H. Seward, Lincoln’s Secretary of State; David Herold, Booth’s co-
conspirator, whom Booth himself hired to kill Andrew Johnson; George Atzerodt,
another conspirator; and a widowed Mrs. Mary Surratt, the owner of the Surratt
Boarding House, which she managed with her husband, John Surratt, Sr. She was a
close friend to John Wilkes Booth. Her execution was problematic to the conscience of
the authorities. Mary Surratt’s son, John Surratt, Jr., returned to America to face trial,
during which he insisted that he was innocent. After all, John was in Elmira, New York
State, when Lincoln was shot. He was acquitted of participating in the conspiracy.
