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.
Really? By whom?? Some idiot judge in Podunk USA ignored a congressional subpoena and as a result an innocent woman dies. Where is the judge now? Hydrating himself, having dinner and continuing his life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.
If no criminal charges have been brought against the white trash that occupied the white house from 1992 on, nobody has the gonads to impeach anybody, much less castrate or hang them. Forget about "checks and balances." We are now full throttle into one big free for all. God help us.
Oddly enough, I don't recall massive fighting 20 miles from Washington. Surely even you don't think the US government was fighting for its life in Vietnam.
and 95% of our media were OPENLY against our government.
Reasonably accurate, though hyperbolic.
During WWII, there was an Isolationist party that did not want us in the European war, and no paper was closed.
Nope, the isolationists were not a Party, they were a movement, and they disappeared on December 7. They had already been dwindling for some time before that.
Communists professors openly criticized our government and were never arrested.
Now there's some hogwash for you. The minute Hitler invaded USSR, some months before Pearl Harbor, the Commies became the biggest advocates of the US entering the War.
People were not arrested and jailed for criticizing Lincoln. They were arrested and jailed for the crime of sedition or other applicable crimes.
I noticed you managed to leave out WWI, when people were indeed jailed for criticizine the president or the government, and with much less justification than in the 1860s. WWI was no life and death struggle for the US.
Cobit was mad as a hatter which he was in civilian life.
It was due to the mercury used in the process.
You open fire on American troops, you reap the whirlwind.
As I understand it, any state could have taken a suit direct to the Supreme Court to determine this. No state chose to do so, largely due to internal politics of forcing waverers to join the secessionists. Instead, they chose to wage war on the federal government.
They didn't want a peaceful secession of a few of the Deep South states, which is all they would have got that way. Such a Confederacy would have been unsustainable. They wanted violent emotions to be inflamed which would lead moderates to spring to the defense of their "brothers."
Worked, too, almost well enough to win the war.
I think FDR died on April 12 but I could be wrong.
Both sides were American Troops....and if I recall, at Manassas, Chancellorsville, Fredricksburg, Cold Harbor, etc. The whirlwind was tinted GRAY!
Some people just can't move on after 140 years. Too bad they can't realize that President Lincoln was the best friend the South had in Washington. His death resulted in Reconstruction being just as damaging as the war itself.
Read my post on Ft. Sumter, from a few days ago...it gives a very interesting and neutral perspective.
The Titanic hit the iceberg on the 14th and sank on the 15th.
You oughta be ASHAMED. Sully Ross is probably turning over in his grave.
Lincoln was NO friend to Texas. I prefer to remember the 70,000 Texans who served under General Lee....or the 540 or so that DIED in Miller's Cornfield at Sharpsburg.
Buddy: I don't live in the 19th Century. I am a Texan that hasn't forgotten what sacrifices Texans made for their Constitutional rights. Maybe you should learn a little of the history of our great State, and be a little less PC.
Calling for all Loyal Southrons PING!
As for forgetting "after 140 years": there were far too many dastardly atrocities committed against unarmed, innocent Southern citizenry, both black and white. To this day, the deeds of units from Ohio, Illinois, and especially the murderous units from Indiana I believe place them in hell for what they did.
Not a lot gets said about this, but there are plenty of records of war crimes upon war crimes by these consciousless, heartless thugs, rapists, thieves, and murderers.
Don't ever forget, Texas (and Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia..) Never forget these murderous devils or their crimes.
Secession? I am still for it. It may take a number of decades to accuate the start of it, but I believe a new country is the only solution to what is left here.
Sam Houston didn't think too highly of him, IIRC.
Are you real? Are you like a ghost from the past? There is no way someone believe in confederacy anymore, or is there?
Holy Smokes! Why isn't this in Breaking News??
Then again: no flashing light on Drudge.
You gotta' be kiddin' me. One attack from without (as bad as it is) is nothing compared to an etire nation at war with itself. No one has had to endure what Lincoln did.
The Supreme Court can't rule on a sovereign act of a state, which is what secession by a vote of the people of a state represents. I am reminded in this of the 1823 words of John Taylor, leading constitutional scholar and a participant in the ratification of the Constitution.
In the creation of the federal government, the states exercised the highest act of sovereignty, and they may, if they please, repeat the proof of their sovereignty, by its annihilation. But the union possesses no innate sovereignty, like the states; it was not self-constituted; it is conventional, and of course subordinate to the sovereignties by which it was formed.
The sovereignties which imposed the limitations upon the federal government, far from supposing that they perished by the exercise of a part of their faculties, were vindicated, by reserving powers in which their deputy, the federal government, could not participate; and the usual right of sovereigns to alter or revoke its commissions.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.