The Assassination of Lincoln: History and Myth

The Civil War officially ended at Appomattox soon after President Lincoln’s second inauguration. During his first term he had been widely viewed by special-interest groups as a good-natured, indecisive bungler, and worse. In the South he was still despised, and many in the North, especially the radicals in the Republican party, distrusted and derided his leniency toward the vanquished. On the evening of April 14, 1865, an assassin’s bullet irrevocably altered the way Abraham Lincoln would be viewed by Americans. In life a cunning politician, Lincoln became in death a selfless martyr. Lloyd Lewis explicates the mythology that evolved out of Lincoln’s death, the outpouring of national grief, the pursuit of John Wilkes booth and the conspirators, booth’s fate, and the frequent moving and reburial of Lincoln’s coffin.