ASSASSINATION has never been an instrument of politics in the U.S.: no plot to seize power, no palace intrigue, has ever cost an American President his life. The three assassins whose bullets killed Presidents Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley were lonely psychopaths, adrift from reason in a morbid fascination with the place history gives those who reverse its orderly progress. Each sought an hour of mad glory—and each died convinced that history would understand.
John Wilkes Booth, 26, was among the most famous American actors of his time, but in the year before he killed Abraham Lincoln, his career was clouded with doom. "I must have fame—fame!" he would cry, but his grand Shakespearean voice was slipping into a chronic and desperate hoarseness, and he wildly determined to find his destiny away from the stage. "What a glorious opportunity for a man to immortalize himself by killing Abraham Lincoln!" he remarked to friends in Chicago two years before his crime.
Booth enlisted several conspirators in a plan to abduct Lincoln and hold him hostage in exchange for imprisoned Confederate troops, but as his plot disintegrated he decided on murder instead, and a number of the others withdrew. Booth nervously bided his time until he could seize a dramatic moment. He chose the night of April 14, 1865 when Lincoln was to attend a performance of Our American Cousin at Ford's Theater in Washington. Booth visited the presidential box—No. 7—a few hours before curtain time, saw that the lock on its door was broken and cut a small peephole through the wood.
Lincoln's only guard was drinking at a nearby tavern when Booth struck. While the audience cheered and hooted over a slapstick line in the play ("Well, I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, old gal—you sockdologizimg old mantrap"), Booth slipped into the box. With a shout of "Sic semper tyrannis! [Thus always to tyrants!] " he fired a shot from his derringer into the back of Lincoln's head. He slashed his way past Lincoln's companion leaped ten feet to the stage and, with a broken shinbone' hurtled himself past startled stagehands and into the night.
Lincoln died nine hours later. Booth lived like a dog while the search for him spread out across the country. Occasionally he saw a newspaper, only to read with bafflement and bitter disappointment that his crime had been condemned throughout the South. On April 26 he was cornered in a barn near Bowling Green, Va. Troops set fire to the barn to force him out and, as he was silhouetted in the flames, saw him felled by a single bullet. "Tell Mother I died for my country," he whispered as he was dragged from the fire.