Random Fascinating Things You Didn't Know About Lincoln's Assassination (13 items)

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  (#9) Lincoln Had Already Seen His Assassin In A Play At Ford's Theater

  April 14, 1865, was not the first time that Lincoln and Booth would meet at Ford’s Theater. Less than two years before that violent night, Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln had attended a performance of the play The Marble Heart at Ford’s Theater, and the celebrated actor John Wilkes Booth played the lead villain, Raphael. Aware the president was in the audience, Booth spoke some of his lines directly to Lincoln. It got to the point where Lincoln’s friend whispered, “Mr. Lincoln, he looks as if he meant that for you.”
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  (#1) The Assassination Was Part Of A Coordinated Attack On Several Other Politicians, Too

  The events of April 14, 1865, were supposed to be even more sinister than the assassination of the president. Booth and some of his conspirators had also meant to murder two prominent members of the Lincoln administration that night: Secretary of State William Seward and Vice President Andrew Johnson. The plan was for each assassin - Booth for Lincoln at Ford’s Theater, Lewis Powell for Seward at his home, and George Atzerodt for Johnson at the Pennsylvania House Hotel - to strike at around 10:00 pm.

  Atzerodt backed out of the plan. Instead of murdering Johnson, he got drunk at a nearby saloon, checked into his room at the hotel, and passed out on his bed. 

  Lewis Powell, a former Confederate ranger with John S. Mosby, followed through with the plan. He gained entry to Seward’s own home and charged into the Secretary of State’s bedroom, slashing and pushing his way past two of Seward’s sons, his daughter, and a Union Army guard. He stabbed Seward and fled the scene. Though Seward’s wounds - and those of his sons’ - were serious, they all healed.
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  (#12) Lincoln Died In A Nearby Boardinghouse Owned By A German Immigrant

  After it became clear that the President had been wounded, soldiers carried his unconscious body out of the theater, in search of a place to examine him. William Petersen, a German immigrant, owned a boardinghouse across the street. When Petersen's boarders heard that the president had been shot, they immediately opened the door and offered the house as a sanctuary for the wounded president and his retinue. Lincoln’s body was too tall for the bed, so soldiers had to lay his body diagonally on the mattress. 
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  (#8) John Wilkes Booth Broke His Leg While Fleeing The Scene

  After firing a bullet into Lincoln’s head and stabbing Henry Rathbone, Booth leapt to the stage of Ford’s Theatre and shouted something at the crowd - it may or may not have been the Latin phrase “Sic semper tyrannus” - before fleeing the theater. In the process of jumping down to the stage, Booth fractured his ankle, causing him some difficulty in moving around.

  Booth and an accomplice continued to the plantation of Samuel Mudd, a doctor in Maryland. Mudd’s Confederate sympathies ran deep, and after setting Booth’s broken bone in a splint and sending him on his way, he did not report the assassin to authorities. For this reason, Mudd was arrested and imprisoned until 1869.
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  (#10) The Conspirators Claimed They Originally Wanted To Kidnap Lincoln, Not Kill Him

  In the trial after the assassination, several of the conspirators claimed that they had not wanted to be involved in a plot that would murder Abraham Lincoln - they only wanted to kidnap him. The original plan had been to capture Lincoln, smuggle him to the Confederate Army, and then use the body of the president as a hostage. Though Booth at least had made an attempt to kidnap or assassinate Lincoln before April 14, 1865, it failed. Some of the conspirators believed that they would only be kidnapping Lincoln, not killing him. But by April 1865, when the South was falling all around him, Booth’s plans had shifted from kidnapping to murder.
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  (#4) Lincoln May Have Had A Premonition He Would Die

  Ward Hill Lamon, one of Lincoln’s friends and colleagues, wrote in a memoir published two decades after the assassination that Lincoln had confided in him about a disturbing dream. On around April 4, 1865, Lamon claimed, Lincoln dreamt that he had walked into a room in the White House, where he saw a body laying on a table. When he asked what had happened, a solider replied, “The president. He was killed by an assassin.”

  To make matters even weirder, Lincoln’s bodyguard also insisted that the president had repeatedly dreamed about his own death. Whether or not this actually happened or it was merely a tale concocted to add dramatic effect to Lincoln’s end, these death-premonition stories suggest that survivors saw Lincoln’s end as a bitter, almost prophetic tragedy.

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