Abraham Lincoln

On the evening of April 14, 1865, Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth shot President Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C., just days after Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox. Lincoln's death shattered any hope for a steady, executive-led reconciliation of the American South. The sudden elevation of Vice President Andrew Johnson, a Southern Democrat hostile to civil rights, sparked bitter battles with the Radical Republican Congress. Johnson's resistance to federal protection for freed people enabled Southern states to enact restrictive Black Codes, leaving a legacy of racial oppression, disenfranchisement, and political fracture that plagued the reunited nation for generations.