What Is The Significance Of John Wilkes Booth's Assassination

John Wilkes Booth was a well-known actor of his time, a supporter of slavery and the southern Confederacy during the Civil War, as well as an assassin who carried out the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln on April 14th, 1865. He has had a pretty big impact on history which holds importance’s to how history played out due to his actions. It was because of his strong beliefs of slavery at the time that led to most of his actions at the time. This was a time of confusion among most as to the rights and wrongs of slavery and the place of black people in the United States otherwise. It was Booth’s belief that African Americans were lucky to be in the United States, even if it was in bondage because they didn’t really belong here any other

The fact that he stayed in the North as an actor fed his fuel and hatred for the North as his performances were not very well welcomed or loved in this area. He acted alongside friends Samuel Arnold, Michel O’Laughlin and John Surratt who would all conspire together in the idea to kidnap President Lincoln and deliver him to the south. The idea of delivering him to the south was the idea that if they did so they could trade him for southern prisoners and they were to carry out the plan three days after but they shortly discovered that the president changed his plans. The South would the surrender to the Union and this caused the men to change their kidnapping plans to murder instead. Their plan was not only to kill President Lincoln but also the Vice President Andrew Jackson and William Seward who was the secretary of state, all on the same night. It was Lewis Powell and David Herold to kill the secretary of state and George Atzerodt to kill the vice president with the hopes that taking them all out at once would disrupt the government and hopefully be replaced by those who were supporters of the south and of

The rest of the plan failed and the Vice president and secretary of state weren’t killed, Atzerodt fled the plan due to nerves and Powell only was successful in wounding Seward. Booth was able to flee for some time but was eventually hunted down which ended in his death and the other conspirators were tried and then hung. The loss of Abraham Lincoln set of a nationwide mourning but luckily he had already made so many changes and put forth so much effort in the way of slave’s freedom that Booth’s plan didn’t really do justice to his own wants. The death of Lincoln changed history in some ways because he would have been control the Radical Republicans and would have better handled reconstruction, but his death caused a lack of leadership and in turn the new President would be Andrew Johnson who was as southerner and former slave owner. So in turn, things were continued in Lincoln’s favor but weren’t necessarily handled as smoothly as Lincoln had planned to. There really is not definite way of knowing exactly how different things would have been if Booth hadn’t assassinated President Lincoln but of course it caused a change in history, although certainly not the way he wished it