The Unknown Story of the Lincoln Assassination
Aubrey Tallon Per. 7
Almost everyone knows the story of the assassination of the United State’s sixteenth President Abraham Lincoln. The story of a president shot from behind while enjoying a play five days after General Lee of the Confederate army surrendered on April 9th, 1865. What people don’t know that his murder originally started out planned as a kidnapping attempt and that Lincoln wasn’t the only victim that night.
There were originally nine men and one woman planning the kidnapping and later murder of Lincoln. The abduction idea was for Booth to kidnap the President on his way home from a play at the Campbell Hospital on March 17, 1865. They would then take him to the Confederate capitol of Richmond, Virginia, where he would be held for a ransom of the release of Confederate prisoners of war. However, this first plan fell apart at the last minute when President Lincoln changed his plans. After this the conspirators changed their minds from a simple abduction to murder. On April 6th, John Surratt brought with him a letter of approval for Lincoln’s assassination from Richmond to a meeting with Booth. This new plan they thought of included Thomas Harvey, the Confederate’s explosive expert, who was to blow up the Executive Mansion. On April 10th, Harvey was captured by the Union Army, and yet again the plan was forced to change.
On April 14th two assassination attempts were made, the first is history. While Lincoln enjoyed a play with his wife at Ford Theater, Booth snuck up behind him, shot him and lept from the balcony, shouting “Revenge for the South!” and breaking his leg. Across town at the same time, Luis Powell and David E. Harold rode up to the home of Secretary of State William Seward, who was bedridden at the time. Powell claimed to be bringing medicine for Seward and when refused entrance, he beat Seward’s son Fredrick into a coma for sixty days with the end of...