President Abraham Lincoln’s Assassination took place on Good Friday, April 14, 1865 at the Ford Theater, in Washington D.C., while they were watching the play Our American Cousin with his wife Mary Todd Lincoln, a twenty-eight year-old officer named Major Henry R. Rathbone, and Rathbone 's fiancée, Clara Harris. After the play was in progress, a figure with a drawn derringer pistol stepped into the presidential box, aimed, and fired. The president slumped forward. The assassin, John Wilkes Booth, dropped the pistol and waved a dagger. Rathbone lunged at him, and though slashed in the arm, forced the killer to the railing. Booth leapt from the balcony and caught the spur of his left boot on a flag draped over the rail, and shattered a bone in his leg on landing. Though injured, he rushed out the back door, and disappeared into the night on horseback. A doctor in the audience immediately went upstairs to the box. The bullet had entered through Lincoln 's left ear and lodged behind his right eye. He was paralyzed and barely breathing. He was carried across Tenth Street, to a boarding-house opposite the theater, but the doctors ' best At almost the same moment Booth fired the fatal shot, his accomplice, Lewis Paine, attacked Lincoln 's Secretary of State, William Henry Seward. Seward lay in bed, recovering from a carriage accident. Paine entered the mansion, claiming to have a delivery of medicine from the Secretary 's doctor. Seward 's son, Frederick, was brutally beaten while trying to keep Paine from his father 's door. Paine slashed the Secretary 's throat twice. There were at least four conspirators in addition to Booth involved in the mayhem. Booth was shot and captured while hiding in a barn near Bowling Green, Virginia, and died later the same day, April 26, 1865. Four co-conspirators, Paine, George Atzerodt, David Herold, and Mary Surratt, were hanged at the gallows of…
