Lincoln's Assassination A Turning Point

Historical Turning Point
On April 14, 1865 President Lincoln was shot in the head by John Wilkes Booth in Ford’s Theatre in the nation’s capital, Washington, D.C. John Wilkes Booth was a Confederate sympathizer and was very upset about the Union victory five days prior to this very dark day in this nation’s history. Booth had been cooperating with the rebels in small ways through the duration of the war, and later planned to kidnap the president. He gathered some people that respected him and he knew would follow him and he planned it all out; his plan was a suicide mission and most of his men wouldn’t go through with it because they valued their lives and thought that Booth could be their leader, but they were not going to let him end their

He felt like he had failed his duty and was more than a little upset about the whole situation. Until one day when he went to pick up his mail from Ford’s Theatre, where they held his mail; when he was leaving he heard mention that the president would be at the theatre for the show that night. He went into a frenzy to get everything prepared for the assassination. He went home to get his gun ready and make sure that it was functional, going into an assassination with a faulty weapon would get him killed; he went to the stables to secure his horse for his quick escape; and he let his men know that they were going to kill the president that night. Obviously, they were a little rattled by the short notice that they were going to attempt something so extreme with such little planning to it. But the men that he still had were ready to do what they had to please John Wilkes Booth. He told the two of them that they were to simultaneously assassinate the secretary of state and the vice

This was one of the biggest turning points in American history, without Lincoln to serve as the lamp in the dark to lead his people to a new age of peace and prosperity in America. Without him rebuilding America was a disaster and the slaves that he had done so much to free, were left out on the streets with no help from the government. Lincoln could have done something about that if he would have survived, but Booth had to take out all of his anger on Lincoln and these poor people were left out on the streets of the Deep South with a lot of tension and anger directed towards them. This tension would exist in the South for so long and in many ways it still exists today, Lincoln may not have been able to change people racial prejudices toward the African American community, but he may have been able to do something to help protect them from all of the harm that was caused to them by angry