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.
Good point!
Indeed it is. At least it was in 1988 when I visited both it and the house where Abe died across the street.
Did you finally find Ford's Theater? It's on 10th Street between E and F Streets NW. Assuming it was Union Station you arrived in DC at, you could have taken the Metro Red line (trains marked for "Shady Grove") from Union Station and gotten off at either the Gallery Place or Metro Center stations. The Metro stations have detailed backlit street maps on the platforms and inside the entrances showing the attractions in the vicinity of the respective stations (although a station like New Carrollton in Prince Georges County, MD has few attractions nearby, other than the Amtrak station which is in the same building. Anyone for office parks? :-))
ff
PS BTW the section of Metro I referred to above is the oldest, opening in March 1976, just in time for the Bicentennial. My first Metro ride took place along this segment in 1979.
Sure, say it all. What about monster Lincoln being bearded top hated queen for a day? A governmental, dictatorial beast, whose only goal was to rule the world as a vicious tyrant...worse then Hitler, Stalin and the Red Chinese, plus that porky, wacko commie in North Korea, Kim Ill Dung....stuff such as that.
If old Abe was all the horrible things you state, he would have been running the South with a horsewhip, not elected as President of the United States.
I'm a proud American who's happy to live in the best country in the world. If you're not happy living here and hoping for another heartbreaking civil war, maybe you should leave. I heard there's still slavery in the Sudan.
If you think being a slave was so peachy, maybe you can offer yourself up.
We did, indeed, take the Metro. I don't recall the classifications, directions etc. We left the Metro, I think, within a couple blocks of the theater. There are so many fun and interesting things to do in DC. I simply wanted to make this one of them. It's fascinating that Lincoln's box is still all dressed up there and that these days they put on productions at the theater while it is a museum.
The war was on but Lee had surrendered, so things were looking bad for the south.
My question is, what would have happened if Lincoln had been killed while the south's army was still strong?
I don't recall that the post was addressed to you.
The idi*t in question claims to be a Texan. If he is, then he better know what he is talking about, as far as I'm concerned.
Booth was a brilliant actor, who obviously thought that killing Lincoln would help. It didn't. Mainly because it was done after the war was over.
I have a better idea. Since you like the North and their ideas so much, just take your happy *ss up there and STAY!
Or better yet, keep going till you are South of the Rio Grande. I have no desire for another WBTS. Just a return to the Constitution of 1789. And vindication for the brave men who fought for Texas. Not that YOU would care. I doubt if any of your kin bled for Texas.
Unsourced and probably an exaggeration. An alternative calculation is presented by the Handbook of Texas Online by the University of Texas - Austin:
By the end of 1861, 25,000 Texans were in the Confederate army. Two-thirds of these were in the cavalry, the branch of service preferred by Texans. Lt. Col. Arthur Fremantle of the British Coldstream Guards, who visited Texas during the war, observed this fondness for cavalry service: "it was found very difficult to raise infantry in Texas," he said, "as no Texan walks a yard if he can help it"....Approximately 90,000 Texans saw military service in the war. Governor Lubbock reported to the legislature in November 1863 that the army numbered 90,000 Texas residents, but this figure seems high for Texans in service at any one time. The 1860 federal census lists 92,145 white males between the ages of eighteen and forty-five years living in the state. Allowing for a slight increase in population during the four years of the war and considering that some Texans younger than eighteen and older than fifty served, one may say that between 100,000 and 110,000 Texans were potential soldiers.
Two-thirds of the Texans enrolled in the military spent the war in the Southwest, either defending the state from Indian attacks and Union invasion.
If "two-thirds" of "90,000 Texans [who] saw military service" were in the "southwest," that only leaves about 30,000 for Lee and all the other confederates commands outside of the southwest. Maybe rustbucket (ping) has researched this question before.
Tell that to the four million black slaves who gained their freedom.
You a wrong on so many levels.
IF California took unilateral action to illegally secede, I would expect President Bush to protect the constitutional rights of the loyal Unionist citizens there and put down the rebellion by the secessionists.
If "bomb[ing] the hell" out of the insurrectionists accomplishes that goal, then, by all means.
By all means, expand upon that insightful comment.
Outside of Virgina, where Lee and the AoNV were able to hold the line against a sequence of weak Union Generals, where, exactly, did the "strong" army of the south have any success? From 1861, the south was losing territory in large chunks to the Union armies in Kentucky, Missouri, Tennessee, western Virgina, New Mexico Territory, Mississippi, Louisiana, etc. And that is not to mention the stranglehold the north had on all of the southern ports-of-call.
The south was doomed from the very beginning, and "President Hannibal Hamlin" and an outraged North would have seen the war out to a similar conclusion.
I'll take that as a complement.
Have a date in mind? The south was losing the war almost from the very beginning. An assasinated president, murdered by a southerner most likely in the pay of Jefferson Davis (or so it could be painted) would be a rallying point, a 'win this for our martyred Abraham Lincoln' kind of thing. In the end the south would still have lost.
The number is not as important as the idea.
I agree with you on that score. I wasn't refering to slavery, but the other problems that came about.
I have elaborated on this subject before, in other threads. I will leave it alone for the moment.
I think that if Lincoln had died, say in 1862, before Sharpsburg, the North would have made peace. Remember, at one point, there was a strong peace movement.
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