Posted on 04/14/2010 5:54:59 AM PDT by central_va
On this day in 1865, John Wilkes Booth, an actor and Confederate sympathizer, fatally shoots President Abraham Lincoln at a play at Ford's Theater in Washington, D.C. The attack came only five days after Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered his massive army at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, effectively ending the American Civil War.
Booth, a Maryland native born in 1838, who remained in the North during the war despite his Confederate sympathies, initially plotted to capture President Lincoln and take him to Richmond, the Confederate capital. However, on March 20, 1865, the day of the planned kidnapping, the president failed to appear at the spot where Booth and his six fellow conspirators lay in wait. Two weeks later, Richmond fell to Union forces.
In April, with Confederate armies near collapse across the South, Booth hatched a desperate plan to save the Confederacy. Learning that Lincoln was to attend a performance of "Our American Cousin" at Ford's Theater on April 14, Booth masterminded the simultaneous assassination of Lincoln, Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William H. Seward. By murdering the president and two of his possible successors, Booth and his conspirators hoped to throw the U.S. government into disarray.
On the evening of April 14, conspirator Lewis T. Powell burst into Secretary of State Seward's home, seriously wounding him and three others, while George A. Atzerodt, assigned to Vice President Johnson, lost his nerve and fled. Meanwhile, just after 10 p.m., Booth entered Lincoln's private theater box unnoticed and shot the president with a single bullet in the back of his head. Slashing an army officer who rushed at him, Booth leapt to the stage and shouted "Sic semper tyrannis! [Thus always to tyrants]–the South is avenged!" Although Booth broke his leg jumping from Lincoln's box, he managed to escape Washington on horseback.
The president, mortally wounded, was carried to a lodging house opposite Ford's Theater. About 7:22 a.m. the next morning, Lincoln, age 56, died–the first U.S. president to be assassinated. Booth, pursued by the army and other secret forces, was finally cornered in a barn near Bowling Green, Virginia, and died from a possibly self-inflicted bullet wound as the barn was burned to the ground. Of the eight other people eventually charged with the conspiracy, four were hanged and four were jailed. Lincoln, the 16th U.S. president, was buried on May 4, 1865, in Springfield, Illinois.
If confederate president Jefferson Davis had been hung from the nearest tree the moment he was captured running away from Richmond in a woman’s dress, perhaps the lionization of Lincoln would have taken a different form.
I am not celebrating anything. Booth was stupid, I have already said that. It is the point of the whole thread. But having said that, go ahead wipe the spittle off of your face and get to work to get me banned. Have at it.
I respectfully disagree with you. In the words of a great man, we should "let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it."
If there is such a thing as post de-facto Presidential jurisdiction 145 yrs. in arrears, then tecnically Linclon never was my President. Interesting concept.
tecnically Linclon = technically Lincoln
I won’t seek your banishment - that you are still here speaks to the mercurial application of policy here. Mores the pity for the respect of this site.
No one has ever said that you or anyone must “like” or respect Lincoln or any other president but to openly disrespect his memory the way you do is beneath contempt. That you willfully and enthusiastically deride anything and anyone outside of your tiny pine-knot of a world-view makes you unfit for normal discourse. When you say that you aren’t doing the things you so clearly are doing it only clarifies what a mealy-mouth wretch you are.
Cretins like you shouldn’t be banned - they should be highlighted and ridiculed for the pieces of shiite that you are. If you had an ounce of shame you would shrivel up and implode into the insignificant lump of nasty that you display to the world.
Too bad the United States didn't follow up.
Yet you mentioned the Jefferson Memorial alone. Keep tap-dancing, Pea. You're good at it.
Wow, N-S help you with that?
Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg
November 19, 1863
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met here on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of it as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But in a larger sense we can not dedicate - we can not consecrate - we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled, here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but can never forget what they did here.
It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they have, thus far, so nobly carried on. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us - that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion - that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom; and that this government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Thank you for the ping!
Anyhow, Your Neo-Marxist hero Lincoln's untimely death was, in fact, to peaceful....
He should have been hung by one leg and whipped to death! Scoundrel's deserve no less.....
And Jeff Davis should have been hung for the traitor he was. But we can't always get what we want, can we?
It was Lincoln, a sitting United States President in fact, FORCED brothers to kill one another. Today 140+ years after the fact, we still fight over his bloody war.
Tyrant is to kind; Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer is more fitting!
Post-war Davis asked for a trial, they wouldn’t give him one.
Are you as equally amazed that people still hotly debate Jesus Christ? After all, that's much, much further back in time......
They should have. But darn that 14th Amendment and all those clemency proclamations of Andrew Johnson's anyway.
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