Lincoln’s Assassination Mediamatters@WFHS
So I am in the midst of reading Killing Lincoln by Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard, and I’m finding out a lot of interesting facts I never knew about his assassination, or the events surrounding it in general. And so I made a list…
1) John Wilkes Booth (Lincoln’s assassin) was engaged to a woman named Lucy Hale. (If that name sounds familiar, you probably have seen the show Pretty Little Liars).
2) Lucy Hale was known to have many other suitors despite her engagement, some of which include John Hay, one of Lincoln’s personal secretaries, and Robert Todd Lincoln, Lincoln’s 21-year-old son who is also a union officer.
3) At first, Booth and his co-conspirators were planning just to kidnap the president. It was Booth who turned it into a plot to murder him.
4) Booth attended Lincoln’s second inaugural address and tried to lunge at him. Because he was a well-known actor, however, the officer who grabbed him back accepted Booth’s excuse that he just stumbled. (Arresting someone like him could have caused policemen problems).
5) Booth had performed at Ford’s Theatre before, where he would later shoot Lincoln.
6) This one isn’t related to his assassination, but I found it very shocking. There was extremely easy access to the White House during Lincoln’s presidency– there was no fence or gate blocking people from coming in. Citizens were allowed to roam the first floor. People could be inside the building all day and even peer in on the president while he worked. Petitioners that wanted to talk to Lincoln even sometimes slept on the floors in the hallways.
7) Supposedly, Lincoln had a dream about his own death three days before his assassination. Although hesitant to do so because he didn’t want to worry anyone, he shared this dream with his wife and friends.
8) The play Lincoln was seeing the night of his assassination was a popular play called Our American Cousin. The other play that was staged that night was Aladdin, or the Wonderful Lamp.
9) The man chosen to guard the one route that led to the state box (where Lincoln was sitting while he watched the play) left to go drinking and had a history of being rude and showing up for work late on a consistent basis. In other words, he was the worst possible choice for a guard.
Media Matters @ WFHS 