John Wilkes Booth Born: Lincoln's Future Assassin

John Wilkes Booth was a working actor from one of America's most famous theatrical families who decided to end the Civil War by killing the president. Born on May 10, 1838, in Bel Air, Maryland, he was the ninth of ten children born to the renowned English-born actor Junius Brutus Booth. His older brother Edwin became the most celebrated American actor of the nineteenth century. John Wilkes entered the theater as a teenager and built a respectable career performing in Shakespeare across the South. He was handsome, charismatic, and popular with audiences. He was also a passionate supporter of the Confederacy and the institution of slavery, though he never enlisted in the Confederate army. By 1864, he had organized a conspiracy initially aimed at kidnapping President Lincoln and exchanging him for Confederate prisoners of war. When the kidnapping plan collapsed and the Confederacy surrendered at Appomattox on April 9, 1865, Booth escalated his plot to assassination. On the evening of April 14, 1865, he entered Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C., during a performance of "Our American Cousin," walked into the presidential box, and shot Lincoln in the back of the head with a .44 caliber Derringer pistol. He leaped from the box to the stage, reportedly shouting "Sic semper tyrannis," broke his leg on landing, and escaped on horseback through southern Maryland. He crossed the Potomac into Virginia with an accomplice. Federal troops tracked him to a tobacco barn on the Garrett farm near Port Royal, Virginia, on April 26. They set the barn on fire. Sergeant Boston Corbett shot Booth through a gap in the barn wall. Booth was dragged out and died on the porch at approximately 7:15 a.m. He was 26. Four of his co-conspirators were hanged.