Lex Fridman · Why Abraham Lincoln was killed | Gary Gallagher and Lex Fridman

1. 1. Lincoln was assassinated just a few days after Lee's troops laid down their arms, shot five days after the surrender.
2. 2. John Wilkes Booth was the youngest of the most famous acting family in the United States, a successful and athletic actor, and an ardent pro-Confederate who didn't enlist but argued for the Confederacy.
3. 3. Booth claimed he heard Lincoln make a statement about black soldiers getting the vote, which he said was the trigger for his decision to kill the tyrant.
4. 4. Booth had earlier plotted to kidnap Lincoln for ransom, but that failed, so he gathered a group of misfits to assassinate the top leadership: Lincoln, Vice President Johnson, and Secretary of State Seward.
5. 5. The conspirator assigned to kill Vice President Johnson chickened out, and Lewis Powell attacked Seward but failed to kill him because the knife hit his neck brace, disfiguring him instead.
6. 6. Booth was shot in a barn rather than captured, and four conspirators, including Mary Surratt, were tried by a military commission and hanged.
7. 7. The hangings of the conspirators and the commandant of Andersonville Prison helped take the edge off Northern demands for retribution, offsetting the anger over Lincoln's assassination.
8. 8. Conspiracy theories about Lincoln's assassination began with a chemist named Otto Eisenchiml, implicating Secretary of War Stanton and radical Republicans who wanted a harsher Reconstruction.
9. 9. The assassination was a random event that turned the tides of history, as a single actor's act killed one of the greatest presidents, despite over 700,000 deaths in the war.
10. 10. At the grand review of the armies in Washington, soldiers and spectators noted Lincoln's absence, saying he should have been there to witness the victory.
11. 11. Lincoln's evolution as a leader and his potential guidance during Reconstruction would have been different, and likely smoother, had he lived.