US History

U.S. History Study Guide

proclaimed. He spoke of giving Blacks the right to vote and moving progressively for Civil Rights. Many people detested Lincoln and scorned his idea of giving a Black man equal rights, John Wilkes Booth was one of them. Booth was an actor by trade, but an ardent pro-slavery Confederate sympathizer. Booth hatched a plan with other conspirators to assassinate Lincoln as well as top members of his cabinet, but their attempts failed, Booth though was successful. He slipped into the President’s Box and fired his Derringer, a single bullet into the back of Abraham Lincoln’s head. Lincoln died the next morning, the first American president to be assassinated. Booth was shot weeks later, while trying to escape from a barn in Virginia. All those captured who were believed to be his co-conspirators in the plot were hanged, including Mary Surratt, who owned the boarding house where the plotters met. This event dramatically altered the events that would unfold in Reconstruction and set the Civil Rights for African Americans decades back.

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