On April 14th, 1865, just days after the surrender of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, President
Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth.
"Sic semper tyrannis!"
The killing took place while the president and his wife attended the comedic play
"Our American Cousin."
Booth, himself a famous stage actor at the time, entered the box in which the Lincolns
were seated and waited for a moment in the play that he knew would elicit a big laugh.
At that point, he burst through the box's inner door and shot Lincoln in the back of
his head with a .44 caliber derringer pistol.
Booth also slashed one of Lincoln's guests with a knife and then jumped onto the stage,
where he yelled either "The South is avenged!"
or "Sic semper tyrannis!"
The latter is Latin for "thus always to tyrants," the state motto of Virginia, a phrase which
had long been associated with the assassination of the dictator Julius Caesar.
The shooting occurred at some point between 10 and 10:30 p.m. Booth quickly escaped from
the theater, and the 26-year-old actor would not be located by federal troops until 12
days later; he died in the ensuing standoff.
Lincoln, meanwhile, immediately fell unconscious in the theater.
An army surgeon, Charles Leale, ran to treat Lincoln and surmised that the wounds were
likely fatal.
The president was carried to a nearby boarding house and observed throughout the night by
Dr. Robert King Stone, Lincoln's personal doctor.
Stone recorded the change in Lincoln's appearance throughout the night.
When he arrived, Lincoln was breathing softly, and he hoped that this might mean his wounds
were not mortal, but the president's respiration soon became more labored.
Stone noticed that Lincoln's right eye was surrounded by discoloration, and the pupil
itself was dilated, while the left eye appeared normal.
Throughout the night, however, the left pupil grew, and by the time of Lincoln's death,
both pupils were equally enlarged.
At one point, Stone made an unsuccessful attempt to locate the bullet by probing the wound,
potentially causing Lincoln more harm in the process.
In the end, Stone concluded that there was nothing left he could do.
Lincoln was pronounced dead at 7:22 a.m. on April 15th.
Lincoln's autopsy was performed at the White House by Army Surgeons Edward Curtis and Joseph
Janvier Woodward, while Surgeon General Joseph K. Barnes was also in attendance.
In a letter to his mother, Curtis wrote that Lincoln's body was placed on boards and covered
with sheets and towels.
He and Woodward began by removing the top of Lincoln's skull to trace the path of the
bullet that killed him.
They didn't locate it until they removed the brain from Lincoln's body, at which point
the bullet fell out of the organ and into a china platter below his head.
In his letter, Curtis wrote:
"There it lay upon the white china, a little black mass no bigger than the end of my finger
— dull, motionless and harmless, yet the cause of such mighty changes in the world's
history as we may perhaps never realize."
In Woodward's autopsy report, the doctor noted that the bullet entered through the occipital
bone, about one inch left of center and just above the left lateral sinus.
The bullet lodged itself in the white matter of the cerebrum, damaging the left lateral
ventricle in the process and filling the brain with blood.
The track of the bullet was found littered with clotted blood and bone fragments, as
well as fragments of the bullet itself.
Externally, the area around Lincoln's eyes were discolored, and his eyes themselves were
slightly bulging, which was the result of the build-up of blood in that area.
When Curtis washed and weighed the brain, he found that it was of ordinary size and
weight, apart from the areas that had been damaged in the shooting.
In addition to performing the autopsy, the doctors also cut off a lock of Lincoln's hair,
at the request of his widow, Mary Todd Lincoln.
The embalmer then prepared Lincoln's body for its public viewing.
The former president went on display in an open coffin in the White House, the Capitol,
and then across the country on a 13-day train journey.
Reportedly, millions of Americans traveled to pay their respects to the late president.
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