Posted on 04/14/2005 6:40:53 PM PDT by kellynla
At Ford's Theater in Washington, D.C., John Wilkes Booth, an actor and Confederate sympathizer, fatally wounds President Abraham Lincoln. The attack came only five days after Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered his massive army at Appomattox, effectively ending the American Civil War.
Booth, who remained in the North during the war despite his Confederate sympathies, initially plotted to capture President Lincoln and take him to Richmond, the Confederate capital. However, on March 20, 1865, the day of the planned kidnapping, the president failed to appear at the spot where Booth and his six fellow conspirators lay in wait. Two weeks later, Richmond fell to Union forces. In April, with Confederate armies near collapse across the South, Booth hatched a desperate plan to save the Confederacy.
Learning that Lincoln was to attend Laura Keene's acclaimed performance in Our American Cousin at Ford's Theater on April 14, Booth plotted the simultaneous assassination of Lincoln, Vice President Andrew Johnson, and Secretary of State William H. Seward. By murdering the president and two of his possible successors, Booth and his conspirators hoped to throw the U.S. government into a paralyzing disarray.
On the evening of April 14, conspirator Lewis T. Powell burst into Secretary of State Seward's home, seriously wounding him and three others, while George A. Atzerodt, assigned to Vice President Johnson, lost his nerve and fled. Meanwhile, just after 10 p.m., Booth entered Lincoln's private theater box unnoticed, and shot the president with a single bullet in the back of his head. Slashing an army officer who rushed at him, Booth jumped to the stage and shouted "Sic semper tyrannis! [Thus always to tyrants]--the South is avenged!" Although Booth had broken his left leg jumping from Lincoln's box, he succeeded in escaping Washington.
The president, mortally wounded, was carried to a cheap lodging house opposite Ford's Theater. About 7:22 a.m. the next morning, he died--the first U.S. president to be assassinated. Booth, pursued by the army and secret service forces, was finally cornered in a barn near Bowling Green, Virginia, and died from a possibly self-inflicted bullet wound as the barn was burned to the ground. Of the eight other persons eventually charged with the conspiracy, four were hanged and four were jailed.
Whatever happened to the Spielberg movie about Lincoln?
It seemed to have fizzled.....
Please clarify that you are speaking for your own personal "south".
Don't forget to mention "shut down the Maryland legislature."
He can certainly speak for TEXAS, as far as I am concerned.......or have you forgotten that 70,000 Texans fought for Gen. Lee?
Look, I was not there to witness Lincoln do his deed, but I am reminded of Gorbachev when he faced many requests from some of his member states to be independent, he let them go without firing one shot.
You were there?
Imagine a newspaper in 1942 advocating violent resistance to the US government to support governments the US was at war with. Surely you don't think such a newspaper should have been allowed to remain in operation?
That was the situation in 1862, except that the US was much closer to being destroyed than at any time in the 1940s.
Or, if you prefer, imagine a 1969 in which violent armed Communist rebellion against the US government is underway. Many hundreds of thousands of Americans have already been killed. A newspaper in your town is publishing exhortations to join the rebels and to sabotage government efforts against it. Do you allow them to continue to publish?
Also, have you ever looked up how the founding fathers, those who wrote the Constitution, dealt with the "traitorous" Tories? They had a much sharper approach than Lincoln ever did.
I think those who object to Lincoln's treatment of oppositionists, which was certainly much gentler than Wilson's treatment of his opponents in WWI, do so primarily because they sympathize with their cause.
All I know is if Bush would ever do any of these things he will be castrated and then hanged.
Lincoln obviously had other motives in mind.....subjugating the South for one......
I have been looking for a list of Reagan's Presidential Pardons. I need to verify one that I heard about in my travels. Do you know of any such list online?
That is true to a point. If Lincoln had just allowed the South to leave, there would have been no war. The South seceded, they weren't trying to overthrow the US Government.
I've been to Ford's Theater many times.
Anybody have an opinion on what would have happened if Lincoln had been assassinated while the war was still on?
That is hogwash, and you know it. During the Vietnam war, we were losing thousands of soldiers, and 95% of our media were OPENLY against our government. During WWII, there was an Isolationist party that did not want us in the European war, and no paper was closed. Communists professors openly criticized our government and were never arrested.
as I said three times already, I did not live during that time. All I have here is comparison of what standard we are expecting from Bush, and that should apply to all other presidents. A dictator would arrest the oppositions!
If Britain and France had allowed Germany to conquer Poland, there wouldn't have been a war in 1939.
If the colonies had submitted to George III, there wouldn't have been a war in 1775.
If the US had allowed Iraq to keep Kuwait in 1989, there wouldn't have been a war.
The whole argument was about whether the South had the right to secede. Of course if they had not been opposed, there would have been no war.
The way I look at it, the right of secession is still an interesting subject. If the states still have that right, which I believe they do, in theory, if Hillary wins the next election, the red states can just secede....:)
And if they did indeed have the right of secession, then Lincoln was wrong.
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