What Day Was the assassination of Abraham Lincoln?

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President Abraham Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth while watching a play at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C., just days after the Confederate surrender at Appomattox that effectively ended the US Civil War.

Lincoln died from his wound early the following morning, becoming the first US president to be assassinated, and Vice President Andrew Johnson was sworn in as his successor that same day.

Booth escaped the theater but was tracked down and killed by Union soldiers roughly twelve days later in Virginia.

Secretary of State William Seward was separately attacked the same night in a coordinated conspiracy, though he survived his injuries, unlike Lincoln.

The assassination is widely seen by historians as having significantly hardened the political mood during the already contentious Reconstruction era that followed, removing a president who had favored a more conciliatory approach toward the defeated South.