Posted on 04/14/2005 6:40:53 PM PDT by kellynla
At Ford's Theater in Washington, D.C., John Wilkes Booth, an actor and Confederate sympathizer, fatally wounds President Abraham Lincoln. The attack came only five days after Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered his massive army at Appomattox, effectively ending the American Civil War.
Booth, 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 Laura Keene's acclaimed performance in Our American Cousin at Ford's Theater on April 14, Booth plotted 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 a paralyzing 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 jumped to the stage and shouted "Sic semper tyrannis! [Thus always to tyrants]--the South is avenged!" Although Booth had broken his left leg jumping from Lincoln's box, he succeeded in escaping Washington.
The president, mortally wounded, was carried to a cheap lodging house opposite Ford's Theater. About 7:22 a.m. the next morning, he died--the first U.S. president to be assassinated. Booth, pursued by the army and secret service 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 persons eventually charged with the conspiracy, four were hanged and four were jailed.
The Southern traitors were no more American than a Canadian or Mexican.
They gave up their country in a failed bid to continue slavery.
And yes, the Texas government at the time wanted U.S. soldiers to protect their borders at the same time trying to kill them by supporting the firing on Fort Sumter. Nice little piece of propaganda there.
"He is admired, of course, because he led the winning side. He is revered because he wrote--when the South was sure to lose--the Emancipation Proclamation. We often overlook the fact that this stirring document was intended to apply only to the Southern states, and not the slave-owning border states; Palmerston's verdict is still fair comment--that Lincoln undertook "to abolish slavery where he was without power to do so, while protecting it where he had power to destroy it." But the overwhelming aspect of his reputation is that he was assassinated, and so he was canonized, because a halo descends on all the murdered Presidents, and on Lincoln most of all."
Well, now...one of my ancestors rode with Quantrill, and he wasn't a slaveowner at all......from St. Joseph, Missouri
Nah - you failed. Did you miss the LOL?
Yea...Jeff wouldn't like you either :)
No, actually, I only fly the flag on certain days, and drink Jack Daniels on the weekend :)
Well, since South Carolina had LEFT the nation, it wasn't his business after all! :)
If he's not, then I am! :)
No, but to make up the Confederacy, it took many seceding states. Texas was the LARGEST.
Yep...Lincoln is to blame for most of it too....
And Assasination isn't always murder.
Lincoln approved of slave ownership foe his supporters, and denied it as a bad thing for his opponents.
Well, I tip my hat to the man who prevented North America from turning in to the Balkins.
So...Are you a transplant? If you are, kindly leave. You are no credit to Texas, or any part of the South.
We have enough Yankee scum residing in our state as it is.
And the problems mentioned happened years BEFORE Ft. Sumter. Texans were fed up by then.
Yes...save the Union, while destroying the Government of the states, and trampling on it's Constitution.
You can bow or whatever. Obviously John Wilkes Booth disagreed.
If the best thing about the south is that they know how to spell, please count me out.
You mean like North and South Korea, China and Taiwan, North and South Vietnam, Iraq and Kuwait, India and Pakistan (except for religion), all of Europe throughout most it's history?
Actually if both countries are governed by egotistical stubborned leaders, they will be at each others throat, you are correct about that. If both countries were governed by peace loving nationalist leaders like Gorbachev, we would had cooperation and best of allies.
Is he too ugly to show up?
Complete BS, Tex and you know it. As a people, we are more free today than we were in 1860. That's not even mentioning that we don't have half of those precious "States" defining some people as property with no right to their own labor, or even their own children, or for 100 years afterward denying those same people access to basic services that they also pay for.
You can bow or whatever. Obviously John Wilkes Booth disagreed.
John Wilkes Booth was a loser, a goof, and a racist fraud who claimed to be pro-Confederate by never had the damn guts to put on a gray uniform and actually fight for his 'cause' like a man. He was a stinking little drunken coward who snuck up on a man and shot him from behind.
If you can raise a glass to that POS, you too are a nut case.
So now you're the gatekeeper for a whole frigg'n state, telling everyone who can stay and who can go? Is your name Santa Anna?
I blame Lincoln for all the snow storms we had this lousy winter, the stinking hurricanes, the diaper headed Persian terrorists, the hordes of illegal aliens invading U.S., all the rotten gas taxes and the fact Americans are being stuffed into euro-jap matchbox cars!
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