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.
BWAAAAHAHAHAHAHA!
Yeah, that'd happen, with New York bankers and the Secretary of the Treasury clinging to Lincoln's cuffs screaming Nooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!
Concurring thud-bump. Much more satisfying to beat the other kids up, show 'em who's boss. And think of all that money, all that political vig!
Enough to turn a bad boy's head.
It probably would have. But instead the south turned to rebellion, started a war, lost a war, had their houses and farms trashed, and haven't stopped bitchin' about it since.
They didn't. The People never do. That's what "sovereign" means. And they are -- but you never told me your answer, when I challenged you months ago.
If the People aren't sovereign, then who is?
Someone you like better, no doubt.
There was no "rebellion".
Lincoln started the war -- or do I need to quote his admiring secretary again?
So subtle. So deft.
Nah, no way. Lincoln was elected president for one purpose: beat up the South, throw 'em in jail, make 'em work for cheap.
Yeah, like the California gold fields, Colorado's silver mines, and the Comstock Lode.
I don't remember anything about their trying to "take away" federal property like Fort Bridger and Fort Osage, either. They walked away from the northern Territories, claimed New Mexico, Arizona, and Oklahoma. All else they gave up -- but you never complain about that, only about the part of the ledger where something might have stuck to them. I don't think fairness or equity is your concern here.
Yes there was.
Lincoln started the war -- or do I need to quote his admiring secretary again?
Let's quote that unnamed southern officer who first said, "Open fire." That's what started the war.
ROTFLMAO.
They had no claim to that, any more than New York or Pennsylvania did. Those were the property of the feds.
Harriet Lane's warshot at the passenger steamer Nashville was the first of the Civil War.
So we're starting to get a picture here......of what you keep refusing to tell us, who's our daddy?
So you conceive of the Federal Government as being above, as in over, as in the boss and owner of, the American People? Is it the Federal Government who, serene and unperturbable by the mewling of the mob, is the real Sovereign of the United States of America?
Is that your candidate for God Emperor?
No, that would be the confederate batteries at Charleston firing on the Rhoda Shannon a week or two prior.
<crickets..........>
No, just the states.
How can the federal government be sovereign over the states, as the states created the federal government? The several states DELEGATED some ENUMERATED powers to Constitution, which then delegated them to the "united" states. They did not delegate the power to prevent secession, or the power to wage war on a state.
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