Abraham Lincoln

ABRAHAM LINCOLN’S ASSASSINATION: BEFORE AND AFTER
Johnny Fifles
2009, 8 October, Thor’s Day
English 1010
Causal Analysis
Final Draft
Abraham Lincoln was the U.S. President, and the very first to be assassinated while in
office. He was shot from behind on Friday, April 14, 1865, by John Wilkes Booth, a
Southerner sympathizer, in the Ford Theater in Washington, D.C. at the presence of
Lincoln’s wife, Mary Todd Lincoln.
What was behind it? Lincoln made some enemies from the South through the
Emancipation Proclamation. It declared all slaves owned by the Confederate States of
America to be free because none of the Confederate States returned to the Union on
January 1, 1863. The Proclamation called for the emancipation of all four million slaves
in the Confederate States and sought an end to slavery once and for all.
them conspired to kill the President, and John Wilkes Booth was one of them.
John Wilkes Booth was friends with Thomas Gorsuch, a slave owner from the
Southern United States. On September 11, 1851, he went to the town of Christiana,
Pennsylvania, to collect his slaves. Nonetheless, the slaves and townspeople resisted.
This encounter turned into a heated riot that ended with Gorsuch’s murder. The South
expected that Gorsuch’s murderer would be convicted of murder. Unfortuntely for them,
the killers were found not guilty, a verdict that angered the South into seceding from the
Union.
John Wilkes Booth plotted Lincoln’s death. He believed that Lincoln’s death would
create enough chaos to distract everyone while the Confederacy would overthrow the
United States government, with the intention of keeping the Confederate States
independent from the rule of the Union. When Booth shot Lincoln, though, he was
proven wrong.
The consequences of Lincoln’s assassination were very ghastly and devastating for
the North and South. Booth ran into a warehouse after he killed Lincoln and was...