On April 14, 1865 President Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth. He was shot in the back of the head in Ford’s theater.
About ten days before the murder of President Lincoln he had a dream of retiring very late he had been up waiting for important dispatches from the front. He could not have been long in bed when he fell into a slumber, for he was weary. He soon began to dream. There seemed to be a death-like stillness about him. Then he heard subdued sobs, as if a number of people were weeping. He thought he had left his bed and wandered downstairs. There the silence was broken by the same pitiful sobbing, but the mourners were invisible. He went from room to room; no living person was in sight, but the same mournful sounds of distress …show more content…
He was puzzled and alarmed. What could be the meaning of all this? Determined to find the cause of a state of things so mysterious and so shocking, he kept on until he arrived at the east room, which he entered. There he met with a sickening surprise. Before he was a catafalque, on which rested a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments, Around it were stationed soldiers who were acting all as guards; and there was a throng of people, gazing mournfully upon the corpse, whose face was covered, others weeping pitifully. ‘Who is dead in the White House?’ he demanded of one of the soldiers, “The President’ was his answer; ‘he was killed by an assassin.’ then came a loud burst of grief from the crowd, which woke him from the dream, he had been strangely annoyed by it ever since. Abraham Lincoln just had dreamed about his own assassination. In August 1864, the Sixteenth President of the United States of America was nearly assassinated about nine months before he was actually assassinated. This is the story. Lincoln was dismissive of any danger to himself or his family. Lincoln complained to the Army Chief of Staff Henry Halleck that he “was more afraid of being shot by the accidental discharge of one of [the new recruits’] carbines or revolvers, than of any attempt on …show more content…
Booth enlisted a group of friends from Washington to aid him in his attempt. That winter, Booth and his conspirators plotted a pair of elaborate plans to kidnap the president; the first involved capturing Lincoln in his box at Ford’s Theater and lowering the president to the stage with ropes. Booth ultimately gave up acting to focus on these schemes, and spent more than $10,000 to buy supplies to outfit his band of kidnappers. Neither of the kidnapping plans bore fruit the second, a ploy on March 17 to capture Lincoln as he traveled in his carriage collapsed when the president changed his itinerary and several of Booth’s conspirators ultimately left the group.On the evening of April 11, the president stood on the White House balcony and delivered a speech to a small group gathered on the lawn. Two days earlier, Robert E. Lee had surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox Court House, and after four long years of struggle it had become clear that the Union cause would emerge from the war victorious. Lincoln’s speech that evening outlined some of his ideas about reconstructing the nation and bringing the defeated Confederate states back into the Union. Lincoln also indicated a wish to extend the franchise to some African Americans at the very least,