Who and and why was president Abraham Lincoln killed? Did they have help?

Question

Were there other countries involved as some have suggested, it took money and resources to get close to the men that were suppose to die that day. Who wanted Lincoln and the others dead and why?

Answer 1

John Wilkes Booth killed him for the Emancipation Proclamation. He was not for freeing the slaves. He had accomplices but they were unsuccessful in their attempts.

Answer 2

Interesting question.
Boothe was the lone gunman in killing Abe, however there were others involved in the plot. Back in the mid 1860s, average people could walk right up to the President and talk to him, today that is impossible.As for other countries being involved, a mere conspiracy theory, the Union had such advanced technology over the other countries of the world that they wanted to be friends with the government. Boothe shot Lincoln as a last act of revenge for what occurred to the Confederacy during the Civil War. It had nothing to do with slavery, and for those that answer it that way need to go beyond a fifth grade education.

Answer 3

John Wilkes Booth killed Abraham Lincoln on April 14, 1865

He was a former Confederate and wanted revenge. He snuck into Lincoln's presidential booth at a play and shot him in the back of the head. He also had accomplices that attempted to kill other heads of state, but Booth was the only one who tried to assassinate Lincoln.

There were no foreign powers, no extra money. A crazy ex-Confederate simply wanted revenge, and so he found a way to sneak into the president's booth. Simple as that.

Answer 4

The southerners wanted Lincoln dead because of the Emancipation Proclamation. They wanted to keep slavery legal in the south for farming purposes, and Lincoln set them free. No other countries involved, just race and power.

Answer 5

What I heard was that some big Bankers were also involved in the deal.

Answer 6

Lincoln was executed as a war criminal, by J.W. Boothe.

Answer 7

Originally, John Wilkes Booth had formulated a plan to kidnap Lincoln in exchange for the release of Confederate prisoners. However, on April 11, 1865 Lincoln gave a speech outside the White House giving his support to voting rights to blacks. This infuriated Booth, who was in the attending crowd. His plan to kidnap Lincoln changed to a plan for assassination.[29]

Lincoln had met frequently with Grant as the war drew to a close. The two men planned matters of reconstruction, and it was evident to all that they held each other in high regard. During their last meeting, on April 14, 1865 (Good Friday), Lincoln invited Grant to a social engagement that evening. Grant declined. Finally, Major Henry Rathbone and Clara Harris (his step-sister and fiancee) agreed to go.

John Wilkes Booth, a well-known actor and a Confederate spy from Maryland, heard that the President and Mrs. Lincoln, along with the Grants, would be attending Ford's Theatre. Having failed in a plot to kidnap Lincoln earlier, Booth informed his co-conspirators of his intention to kill Lincoln. Others were assigned to assassinate vice-president Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William H. Seward.

Without his main bodyguard Ward Hill Lamon, to whom he related his famous dream of his own assassination, Lincoln left to attend the play Our American Cousin at Ford's Theater. As a lone bodyguard wandered, and Lincoln sat in his state box (Box 7) in the balcony, Booth crept up behind the President's box and waited for the funniest line of the play, hoping the laughter would cover the noise of the gunshot. On stage, a character named Lord Dundreary (played by Harry Hawk) who has just been accused of ignorance in regards to the manners of good society, replies, "Well, I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, old gal — you sockdologizing old man-trap..." When the laughter came Booth jumped into the box with the President and aimed a single-shot, round-slug .44 caliber Deringer at his head, firing at point-blank range. The bullet entered behind Lincoln's left ear and lodged behind his right eyeball. Major Henry Rathbone momentarily grappled with Booth but was cut by Booth's knife. Booth then leapt to the stage and shouted "Sic semper tyrannis!" (Latin: "Thus always to tyrants") and escaped, despite a broken leg suffered in the leap. A twelve-day manhunt ensued, in which Booth was chased by Federal agents (under the direction of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton), until he was finally cornered in a barnhouse in Virginia and shot, dying soon after. Of Booth's other conspirators, only one came close to assassinating his target: Lewis Powell attacked and critically injured Secretary of State Seward.

An army surgeon, Doctor Charles Leale, quickly assessed the wound as mortal. The President was taken across the street from the theater to the Petersen House, where he lay in a coma for nine hours before he died. Several physicians attended Lincoln, including U.S. Army Surgeon General Joseph K. Barnes of the Army Medical Museum. Using a probe, Barnes located some fragments of Lincoln's skull and the ball lodged 6 inches (15 cm) inside his brain. Lincoln never regained consciousness and was officially pronounced dead at 7:22 a.m. April 15, 1865. There is some disagreement among historians as to Stanton's words after Lincoln died. All agree he began "Now he belongs to the..." with some stating he said "ages", while others believe he said "angels". After Lincoln's body was returned to the White House, his body was prepared for his lying in state in the East Room.

The Army Medical Museum, now named the National Museum of Health and Medicine, has retained in its collection several artifacts relating to the assassination. Currently on display in the museum are the bullet that was fired from the Deringer pistol, the probe used by Barnes, pieces of Lincoln's skull and hair, and the surgeon's cuff stained with Lincoln's blood.


Lincoln's funeral train carried his remains, as well as 300 mourners and the casket of his son William, 1,654 miles (2,661 km) to Illinois.Lincoln's body was carried by train in a grand funeral procession through several states on its way back to Illinois. The nation mourned a man whom many viewed as the savior of the United States. Copperheads celebrated the death of a man they considered an unconstitutional tyrant. He was buried in Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield, Illinois, where a 177 foot (54 m) tall granite tomb surmounted with several bronze statues of Lincoln was constructed by 1874. To prevent repeated attempts to steal Lincoln's body and hold it for ransom, Robert Todd Lincoln had Lincoln exhumed and reinterred in concrete several feet thick in 1901.

Answer 8

He was killed by a redneck that didn't want the slaves freed.

Answer 9

Back then it was able to do it on the cheap.

Answer 10

Approximately 7 hours before shooting the President, Booth dropped by the Washington hotel which was Vice-President Andrew Johnson's residence. Upon learning from the desk clerk that neither Johnson nor his private secretary, William A. Browning, was in the hotel, Booth wrote the following note: "Don't wish to disturb you Are you at home? J. Wilkes Booth." Browning testified before the military court that he found the note in his box later that afternoon. Did Johnson and Booth know each other? In the 1997 publication "Right or Wrong, God Judge Me": The Writings of John Wilkes Booth edited by John Rhodehamel and Louise Taper it is stated on p. 146 that Booth had previously met Johnson in Nashville in February, 1864. At the time Booth was appearing in the newly opened Wood's Theatre. Also, author Hamilton Howard in Civil War Echoes (1907) made the claim that while Johnson was military governor of Tennessee, he and Booth kept a couple of sisters as mistresses and oftentimes were seen in each other's company. Lincoln had essentially ignored Johnson after Johnson's embarrassing behavior on Inauguration Day. Mary Todd Lincoln felt Johnson was involved. On March 15, 1866, she wrote to her friend, Sally Orne:

"...that, that miserable inebriate Johnson, had cognizance of my husband's death - Why, was that card of Booth's, found in his box, some acquaintance certainly existed - I have been deeply impressed, with the harrowing thought, that he, had an understanding with the conspirators & they knew their man... As sure, as you & I live, Johnson, had some hand, in all this..."

Some members of Congress also thought Johnson was involved and a special Assassination Committee was established to investigate any evidence linking Johnson to Lincoln's death. Nothing suspicious was ever found by the committee; yet a belief by some Americans that Johnson was somehow involved with Booth continued for many years.

THEORY #2
LINCOLN DIED BY WAY OF A SIMPLE CONSPIRACY ORGANIZED BY JOHN WILKES BOOTH

This theory has John Wilkes Booth as the mastermind and that all remaining conspirators, with the one exception of John Surratt, were either hanged or sent to prison at Ft. Jefferson. Among the books that have supported this theory are Clara Laughlin's The Death of Lincoln: The Story of Booth's Plot, His Deed, and the Penalty, David M. DeWitt's The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln and Its Expiation, and George S. Bryan's The Great American Myth. The simple conspiracy theory paints Booth as a Southern patriot and racist who originally planned to kidnap the President, take him to Richmond, and hold him in exchange for Southern prisoners of war. When the kidnapping plans fell through, Booth turned to assassination as his means for revenge. The entire plot consisted simply of John Wilkes Booth as the leader of a small band of co-conspirators. In 2004 Michael W. Kauffman's encyclopedic American Brutus: John Wilkes Booth and the Lincoln Conspiracies was published. Kauffman paints Booth as a master at manipulating people, not as a stooge for others.


THEORY #3
LINCOLN'S ASSASSINATION WAS THE RESULT OF A CONFEDERATE PLOT

The idea that Lincoln was killed as part of a grand conspiracy of Confederates arose almost immediately after the assassination. Coded letters found in Booth's trunk back at the National Hotel tied him to the Confederacy. This theory has undergone a marked revival in the past 20 years. In 1977 a statement conspirator George Atzerodt made before the trial in 1865 was uncovered. In it Atzerodt told of Booth's knowledge of a Confederate plot to blow up the White House. The hypothesis of a Confederate grand conspiracy was detailed in 1988 by William A. Tidwell, James O. Hall, and David Winfred Gaddy in Come Retribution: The Confederate Secret Service and the Assassination of Lincoln. Further evidence was supplied by Tidwell in 1995 with the publication of April '65: Confederate Covert Action in the American Civil War. (Another work which stresses Confederate involvement, but lacks the detail of the aforementioned books, is Larry Starkey's Wilkes Booth Came to Washington). Proponents of the Confederate grand conspiracy point out that as the Confederacy's situation deteriorated, more daring and reckless planning was needed. Lincoln was viewed as a legitimate wartime target. This was especially true after the Union's failed Dahlgren raid on Richmond that had been approved by Lincoln himself and was evidence of Lincoln's increasing determination to take whatever steps were necessary to end the war. Colonel Ulrich Dahlgren was killed in the raid, and on his person several documents were found, one of which said, "The men must be kept together, and well in hand, and once in the city, it must be destroyed and Jeff Davis and his cabinet killed." Lincoln had hand-picked Dahlgren for the raid, and the Confederate government now believed the Union President had ordered Davis's death.

Confederate grand conspiracy theorists feel Judah Benjamin, the Confederate Secretary of State, was deeply involved in the plot to kidnap/kill Abraham Lincoln. He burned all of his records before Richmond was evacuated. Benjamin escaped to England, and he was the only member of the Confederate government never to return to the United States. He practiced law in England until 1883 and died in Paris on May 6, 1884.

The theory of a Confederate grand conspiracy portrays Booth as a rebel agent working to organize a band of men to kidnap Lincoln. When Richmond fell, the plans turned to assassination. First, there was the failed effort to blow up the White House followed by the successful effort to kill Lincoln at the theater. Just as Lincoln may have ordered the killing of Jefferson Davis and his Cabinet by Ulrich Dahlgren and his men, Judah Benjamin and Jefferson Davis were involved in the plans to kidnap and later assassinate Abraham Lincoln. The theory of Confederate complicity in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln is accepted by many of the current Lincoln assassination historians, scholars, researchers, and writers. The actual trigger for Booth's actions was the April 10th capture of explosives expert Thomas F. Harney who was on his way to Washington to bomb the White House. Booth, knowing Harney's mission had failed, tried to make up for Harney's disaster by taking matters into his own hands and killing the President at Ford's Theatre. For the latest on this theory see the articles entitled "Who Ordered Lincoln's Death?" by James E.T. Lange and Katherine DeWitt in the June, 1998, edition of North & South magazine and "The Lincoln Assassination Revisited" by William Hanchett and "Risking the Wrath of God" by Edward Steers, Jr. in the September, 2000, issue of North & South. Confederate plans to blow up the White House seem to be confirmed by George Atzerodt's Lost Confession.

THEORY #4
LINCOLN'S ASSASSINATION WAS THE RESULT OF A CONSPIRACY OF POWERFUL INTERNATIONAL BANKERS

This theory is that Abraham Lincoln was killed as a result of his monetary policies. John Wilkes Booth would be seen as a 'hired gun.' In its simplest terms, the theory is that Lincoln needed money to finance the Civil War. He was offered loans at high interest rates by bankers in Europe led by the Rothschilds. Rather than accept the loans, Lincoln found other means to fund the war effort. More importantly, the British bankers opposed Lincoln's protectionist policies. Some Englishmen in the 1860's believed that "British free trade, industrial monopoly and human slavery travel together." Lincoln's policies after the Civil War would have destroyed the Rothschilds' commodity speculations. After the war, Lincoln planned a mild Reconstruction policy which would have enabled a resumption of agriculture production. The Rothschilds were betting the other way on high prices caused by a tough Reconstruction policy toward the South. Lincoln was viewed as a threat to the established order of things, and he was assassinated as a result. The goal was to weaken the United States so the Rothschilds could takeover its economy. An article titled "The Rothschilds' International Plot to Kill Lincoln" was published October 29, 1976, in New Solidarity.

THEORY #5
THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH WAS BEHIND LINCOLN'S ASSASSINATION

In 1886 an ex-priest by the name of Charles Chiniquy (pictured to the left) wrote a book titled Fifty Years in the Church of Rome which portrayed the assassination of Lincoln as a Catholic grand conspiracy. Chiniquy maintained that Jefferson Davis had offered $1,000,000 if someone would "kill the author of the bloodshed." Chiniquy wrote that the money could be offered, but that "...the Jesuits alone could select the assassins, train them, and show them a crown of glory in heaven..." Booth was the tool of the Jesuits. He was corrupted and directed by the Vatican. In 1906 Chiniquy said that "the President, Abraham Lincoln, was assassinated by the priests and the Jesuits of Rome." In 1856 Chiniquy had been defended in court by Lincoln. Chiniquy had quarreled with his bishop and then was sued for slander by one of the bishop's friends (the bishop himself having nothing to do with the complaint). A morals charge was also involved. The case was heard May 20-22, 1856, in Urbana, Illinois. Lincoln arranged for a compromise settlement, but Chiniquy interpreted the settlement as a victory over the church. He felt some Jesuits held Lincoln responsible for the settlement. In 1897 Thomas M. Harris, a member of the 1865 military commission, wrote a book entitled Rome's Responsibility for the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Other books that involve the Roman Catholic Church in Lincoln's assassination include DEMOCRACY UNDER SIEGE The Jesuits' Attempt to Destroy the Popular Government of the United States: The True Story of Abraham Lincoln's Death by C.T. Wilcox and The Suppressed Truth about the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln by Burke McCarty (1924). McCarty's opening sentence was, "In all the bloody history of the Papacy, perhaps in no one man, as in Abraham Lincoln, was there concentrated such a multitude of reasons for his annihilation by that system." An Inquiry into the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln by Emmett McLoughlin was published in 1963. Among other points, McLoughlin maintained that the majority of American Catholics were in favor of slavery and opposed to Lincoln. The author said the totalitarian Papacy considered Lincoln a major enemy, and that the Church for centuries had "been involved in numerous instances of the forcible removal of heads of state whom it condemned."

THEORY #6
SECRETARY OF WAR EDWIN STANTON WAS THE MASTERMIND BEHIND LINCOLN'S ASSASSINATION

In 1937 Otto Eisenschiml's Why Was Lincoln Murdered was published. The book espoused the hypothesis that Edwin Stanton was directly involved in Lincoln's death. It alleged that Stanton was against Lincoln's mild Reconstruction policies and wanted him out of office so more radical Reconstructionist policy could be employed. On the day of the assassination Ulysses S. Grant was expected to attend Our American Cousin with the Lincolns. Eisenschiml argued that had Grant attended, the military guards who protected him would never have allowed Booth to enter the State Box at Ford's Theatre. Eisenschiml further argued that Grant's refusal of the Lincolns' theater invitation was due to an order by Stanton to change his plans for the evening. Eisenschiml's theory was that Grant's absence left Lincoln vulnerable. Stanton was also alleged to have known that conspirators were meeting at the Surratt boardinghouse, and that he refused to release from duty the powerful Major Thomas T. Eckert after Lincoln asked for him as a bodyguard (falsely stating that Eckert had vital work to do at the War Department's Telegraph Office). Eisenschiml continued from there to make a case against Stanton by examining an entire series of events following Booth's shot. Nearly every move Stanton made is seen as suspicious and containing an ulterior motive. Among these behaviors and events were not alerting the security at the Navy Yard Bridge (over which Booth escaped), the mysterious interruption of telegraph communications, secretly arranging to have Booth killed before being brought to trial, and the suppression of evidence by removing pages from Booth's diary. Between the publication of Why Was Lincoln Murdered and the late 1970's, other books were published which supported and amplified Eisenschiml's hypothesis. For example, Theodore Roscoe's The Web of Conspiracy (1959) found Stanton's behavior very suspect. Other high government officials were also implicated.

Further evidence against Stanton was discovered by chemist Ray Neff who found cipher messages allegedly written in 1868 by Lafayette Baker, head of the National Detective Police, which implicated himself, the Secretary of War, and many others including Congressmen. David Balsiger and Charles E. Sellier's 1977 publication, The Lincoln Conspiracy, was made into a major motion picture. However, during the past 20 years, research has clearly tended to vindicate Edwin Stanton. In hindsight, behavior by Stanton that appears to be linked to a conspiracy has been shown to be innocent and in some cases, fabricated. Current scholarship indicates plausible explanations for the actions Eisenschiml and other authors of the 1937-1977 era found suspicious. One good source for those wishing to read about the vindication of Edwin Stanton is Section 3 of Part Five (pp. 170-177) of Stephen B. Oates' Abraham Lincoln: The Man Behind the Myths. Also, there is a page on the web on this subject. A recent book which revives the Stanton suspicions is Robert Lockwood Mills' 1994 publication of It Didn't Happen The Way You Think. The Lincoln Assassination: What The Experts Missed.
Dr. William Hanchett's closing sentences in The Lincoln Murder Conspiracies are as follows: "Lincoln would not have enjoyed the extravagant and pseudoreligious praise being offered in his name by so many Americans. Possibly he would have been reminded of some anecdote by which to deflate the absurdities of such exaggerations. But one suspects that if he could learn of the slush written about the suggested involvement of his secretary of war in his own death he would simply become angry."

Other groups and individuals that have at times been implicated in Lincoln's assassination include Freemasons, domestic bankers, financiers and businessmen, Copperheads, certain Radical Republicans (either on their own or in concert with Edwin Stanton), the B'nai B'rith, and the Knights of the Golden Circle. Major Henry R. Rathbone, John F. Parker, and Mary Todd Lincoln have not totally escaped suspicion. Speculation that Booth's motivation was to avenge the hanging of Confederate John Yates Beall is not proven (for details please see the November, 2000, edition of the Surratt Courier). Although it's been over 140 years since the assassination, any kind of closure on all of the circumstances surrounding the event still seems a long way in the distance. Judging simply by e-mail messages to me over the past eight years, the general public favors theories 2 and 6 mentioned above. The preponderance of recent published material by scholars and writers supports numbers 2 and 3. Some experts would combine the two saying that, although JWB had strong ties to the Confederacy, the actual events of April 14, 1865, were planned by JWB, not Richmond. Most everyone admits there is circumstantial evidence that ties Confederate agents to JWB; the difference comes in the interpretation of this evidence. It seems certain that the controversy will continue well into the new century. Future studies and interpretations are a surety. Perhaps all the answers will never be known. In his 1999 publication entitled The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln, Professor Thomas Reed Turner (author of Beware the People Weeping: Public Opinion and the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln) notes the recent trend of professional historians who have been researching and writing about the assassination.

Although this trend is a very positive one, those who continue to hope that the assassination may be "solved," in the same manner as a murder mystery may be solved, are destined to be disappointed. The century which has passed, makes any new and definitive solution to the crime doubtful. It is unlikely that a smoking gun will surface even though there may still be new sources which will be discovered.