The assassination of Abraham Lincoln sent shockwaves through the country that can still
be felt today, a hundred and fifty years later.
The country had just been through a brutal civil war, the process of Reconstruction was
just beginning, and a single gunshot at Ford’s Theater robbed the country of its central
figure.
It was the first successful assassination of a US President, but not the last: two more
Presidents would be assassinated in the next forty years.
One question that lingers today is how it was allowed to happen.
How did a celebrity actor not sympathetic to the President’s cause sneak up on the
President at a show and assassinate him.
Why did President’s Lincoln’s security fail that night at Ford’s Theater?
The United States Secret Service, tasked with protecting the President and other elected
leaders as well as finding counterfeit currency and removing it from the market, was created
on July 5th, 1865.
This was only three months after President Lincoln was shot.
Before that, Presidents weren’t protected by a federal agency but by a limited group
of bodyguards.
This let bad actors get close to Presidents with little resistance in a way they would
never be able to today.
The first attempt on the life of a US President wasn’t Lincoln,but happened thirty years
earlier against Andrew Jackson.
Richard Lawrence, a disgruntled house painter with a history of mental illness, attempted
twice to shoot the President but the guns jammed due to rust.
Jackson saw this and chased the would-be assassin down, severely beating him with his cane before
he was removed.
The target was uninjured, but the same couldn’t be said for the shooter.
Despite this close call, Presidential security hadn’t advanced much by the time Abraham
Lincoln sat in the White House.
He was the most controversial President to that date, hated by half the country for his
staunch anti-slavery stance and his unwillingness to let the Union break up.
The Union won the war, but many Confederate loyalists were unwilling to accept defeat.
That didn’t keep Lincoln from venturing out into public with limited security, as
most Presidents only went with a single security officer or patrolman protecting them.
Some past Presidents like Thomas Jefferson walked to their own inauguration.
It wasn’t unusual that when Lincoln went to see a performance of “Our American Cousin”,
he only had Officer John Frederick Parker of the Metropolitan Police Department of the
District of Columbia with him.
The idea of a Presidential assassination wasn’t high on people’s minds in 1865, as neither
Lincoln nor his security companion were concerned with constant protection.
Parker was assigned to guard the theater box where Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln and their
companions, Henry Rathbone and Clara Harris, were seated.
While he stayed at his post at the start of the play, he would later claim Lincoln had
released him at his service at intermission and Parker went to a local tavern with some
of Lincoln’s servants.
He wasn’t at the theater when John Wilkes Booth snuck into the President’s box and
shot him.
The exact circumstances of Parker’s absence were hotly debated, and he was placed on trial
for dereliction of duty less than a month after the assassination.
Today, a Secret Service agent leaving their post and abandoning the President to get shot
would be an open-and-shut case.
In 1865, Presidential security was a very informal affair and the charges against Parker
were quickly dismissed.
Not only was he a free man, but Parker was assigned to be Mary Todd Lincoln’s bodyguard
as she moved out of the White House.
While the law had forgiven Parker’s negligence, Mrs. Lincoln never would and she made clear
she blamed Parker for her husband’s assassination.
While some speculated that he may have been complicit in the assassination, he was never
charged in connection with the criminal conspiracy.
The most likely answer for Parker’s role in Lincoln’s death is that he was a lazy
officer looking for an excuse to beg off work.
This theory got a big boost in 1868, when his undistinguished career with the police
force ended after he was fired for sleeping on the job.
The lack of protection for Lincoln made his assassination easy, but another major factor
is that John Wilkes Booth was a very unlikely figure for a Presidential assassin.
Most would-be assassins are mentally ill, political radicals, or have financial grievances
against the President.
John Wilkes Booth was one of mid-19th century America’s most famous and well-regarded
actors, one of the prominent Booth theatrical family.
His sympathies with the Confederates and his support for slavery was well-known, but as
a member of high society few would have seen him as a security risk.
His hatred for Lincoln curdled into violence when Robert E. Lee surrendered to the Union,
and he believed the war was ongoing because a sector of the Confederate army led by General
Joseph E. Johnston was still fighting.
John Wilkes Booth made a uniquely dangerous Presidential assassin because of his access
to the full floor plan of Ford’s Theater.
He was not in the cast of the show at the theater that night, but he had been one of
the first lead actors to star in a play there after it was opened in 1962.
He had previously been invited to meet Lincoln in his booth while performing there, declining
due to his hatred for the President.
This gave him the opportunity to case the President’s seating area, something that
became deadly when he joined an assassination plot years later.
Booth began conspiring to kill or kidnap Lincoln as the 1864 election approached, once Confederate
fortunes on the battlefield were waning.
He originally planned to assassinate multiple figures, including Vice President Andrew Johnson
- an anti-slavery Union loyalist - and Secretary of State William Seward.
Booth put his plan to kill Lincoln into effect in a hurry after picking up his mail at the
theater and learning Lincoln would be there that night.
While security was lax, Booth was far more thorough than most Presidential assassins.
He used his access to the theater to drill a hole into the door of the Presidential box,
letting him spy on the first family and pick the perfect time to make his move.
He deputized two of his co-conspirators, George Atzerdot and Lewis Powell, to assassinate
the other targets.
Atzerdot backed out, and Powell nearly murdered Seward at his own home before being wrestled
away by the Secretary of State’s son.
It was only Booth who successfully hit his target, shooting Abraham Lincoln in the back
of the head while shouting the line that would become famous - “Sic Semper Tyrannis”.
Booth was nearly captured by Major Henry Rathbone in the immediate aftermath, but escaped by
leaping from the balcony, injuring his leg in the process.
Lincoln succumbed to his wounds a day later, and the pursuit of the assassin and his co-conspirators
was one of the biggest manhunts in American history at the time.
Booth’s co-conspirators were quickly rounded up, but Booth stayed on the lam for over a
week before being shot in a standoff with Union soldiers.
Eight co-conspirators were tried, with Powel, Atzerodt, David Herold, and Mary Surrat being
sentenced to death by hanging.
In the angry atmosphere after the assassination, even Dr. Samuel Mudd, who treated the injured
Booth, was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment.
He was pardoned in 1869.
After Lincoln’s assassination, the importance of Presidential security was made clear, but
Congress wasn’t quick to act.
The country was in shambles and barely functioning as a single nation after the civil war, and
the priority was on Reconstruction.
The Secret Service was founded only months after the assassination, but its focus was
on fighting counterfeit money.
While today counterfeiting is a niche crime for small amounts, at the time up to a third
of US money was counterfeit.
The agency’s mission soon expanded to investigating a wide range of federal crimes ranging from
illegal gambling to murder.
The agency began building a law enforcement apparatus, but presidential security was still
left to local police departments and private security until a pair of assassinations in
the latter part of the 19th century made clear just how flawed the current system was.
President James A. Garfield had only been in office for four months when he was ambushed
at a train station in Washington, DC by Charles J. Guiteau, a disgruntled lawyer who believed
he had been instrumental in Garfield’s election and deserved a political appointment.
He had only been a minor speechwriter and had a history of mental illness, and stalked
Garfield for weeks before making his move.
He shot Garfield twice non-fatally before being apprehended, but poor medical treatment
led to infections that claimed the President’s life 79 days after the shooting.
Guiteau was apprehended after the shooting by local policeman Patrick Kearney, who didn’t
even bother to take the gun off the assassin before taking him in.
Guiteau was executed for the assassination, but many experts say the fault for Garfield’s
death lies with his doctors.
It was another case of an assassin with a grievance getting too close to a President
with little to no security.
It was only twenty years later when President William McKinley became the next President
to fall prey to an assassin and lack of security in 1901.
Just reelected, McKinley was attending the Pan-American Exhibition at the Temple of Music
in Buffalo, New York when he was targeted by anarchist Leon Czolgosz.
This was the biggest event where a President was targeted yet, making security much more
difficult and exposing the President to unfamiliar people and lax security at every turn.
Czolgosz, who had lost his job in the Panic of 1883, managed to shoot McKinley twice,
with one bullet becoming lodged in his abdomen.
McKinley eventually died from complications from his injuries a week after the assassination,
and Czolgosz was executed for murder.
McKinley was a famously gregarious President and didn’t like to be surrounded by security,
leaving him more vulnerable.
Three assassinations in forty years isn’t a coincidence.
If you make a mistake at your job once, it might be overlooked.
Three times, there’s probably going to be a change in policy or staffing.
Soon after the assassination of McKinley, Congress asked the Secret Service to take
over protecting the President and his family.
Presidential security stopped being a personal preference and became an integral part of
the job.
Secret Service agents foiled an assassination attempt on Harry Truman in 1950 by Puerto
Rican extremists.
One of the heroic agents, Leslie Coffelt, is the only Secret Service agent to die in
the process of stopping a Presidential assassination.
Presidential assassination attempts remained commonplace through the 20th century, but
were less successful.
The fourth and final assassination of a President, the murder of John F. Kennedy by Lee Harvey
Oswald, was the only one done from afar.
Oswald used a sniper rifle against Kennedy from a nearby building, aiming at the passing
motorcade.
This led the Secret Service to start enforcing stricter security along the paths of the Presidential
motorcade.
The Kennedy family had another major impact on Secret Service policy after the assassination
of Senator Robert Kennedy in 1968, when the agency becan offering protection for major
party Presidential candidates.
The effectiveness of the Secret Service was proven in the 1970s and 1980s, when an unstable
political climate led to more assassination attempts.
Manson Family groupie Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme approached President Gerald Ford supposedly
to make a plea for trees, but quickly pulled a gun.
She was immediately tackled by Secret Service agent Larry Buendorf and disarmed.
She never managed to shoot Ford, but was charged under a post-Kennedy law that made attempting
to assassinate the President a federal crime.
Although sentenced to life in prison, she was paroled after twenty-nine years and remains
the only US would-be assassin to be released from prison.
A far more serious attempted assassination happened less than a decade later when John
Hinkley, a mentally ill man obsessed with Jodie Foster, shot newly elected President
Ronald Reagan only months after his inauguration.
Reagan, his Press Secretary James Brady, a Secret Service agent, and a local policeman
were all injured, but all survived.
Agents shielded Reagan from further shots and tackled Hinkley, who was eventually found
not guilty by reason of insanity and confined to a mental institution.
Presidential protection has changed with the decades, and every attempted assassination
led to an update in the security process.
So how did Abraham Lincoln, maybe the President with the most enemies of any in history, get
shot in his theater box with no one noticing?
There are many theories about co-conspirators and plots, but the most likely answer is that
John Wilkes Booth was able to shoot Lincoln because no one saw it coming.
A celebrity actor who works at the theater developing an elaborate plot to kill the President
while he watches a play sounds like a conspiracy thriller, not history.
Every Presidential assassination was a unique set of circumstances, and the Secret Service
evolves with the time.
Their proactive approach now has worked, with no assassination attempts since 1981.
Alas, for Abraham Lincoln, no one thought Presidential security was needed - until it
was.
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