Assassination of Abraham Lincoln, murderous attack on Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States, at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C., on the evening of April 14, 1865. Shot in the head by Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln died the next morning. The assassination occurred only days after the surrender at Appomattox Court House of Gen. Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia to Union forces led by Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, which had signaled the effective end of the American Civil War. Lincoln’s death plunged much of the country into despair, and the search for Booth and his accomplices was the largest manhunt in American history to that date.
