One hundred and fifty-nine years ago, a 26-year-old white supremacist and Confederate sympathizer named John Wilkes Booth pointed a .44 caliber derringer pistol at the back of Abraham Lincoln’s head and squeezed the trigger. The 56-year-old president clung to life for nine agonizing hours, expiring the next morning in a cramped room rented by Union veteran Willie Clark.
Lincoln’s death elevated a bigoted Democrat from east Tennessee, Andrew Johnson, to the presidency — and thereby changed the course of Reconstruction. Booth’s bullet pitched a nation still reeling from four years of fratricidal war — a conflict that had snuffed out the lives of nearly 3 percent of the U.S. population — into a moment of profound precarity.
Comments