President Abraham Lincoln is shot in Ford’s Theatre by John Wilkes Booth; He dies the following day.

The assassination of Abraham Lincoln occurred on the night of April 14, 1865, just days after the end of the American Civil War, marking a pivotal and tragic moment in U.S. history. Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth, a well-known actor and Confederate sympathizer, while attending a play—Our American Cousin—at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C. Booth slipped into the presidential box and shot Lincoln in the back of the head with a .44 caliber derringer pistol. After the shooting, he leapt onto the stage and escaped, despite breaking his leg in the process. Lincoln was carried across the street to a boarding house, where he died the following morning. Booth’s motive was rooted in his outrage over the South’s defeat and Lincoln’s stance on abolition. The assassination shocked the nation and derailed the process of post-war reconciliation, plunging the country into deeper political and racial turmoil during the fragile beginnings of Reconstruction.