John Wilkes Booth (May 10, 1838 – April 26, 1865) was an American stage actor who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre, in Washington, D.C., on April 14, 1865. Lincoln died the next morning from a single gunshot wound to the back of the head, becoming the first American president to be assassinated. Booth was a member of the prominent 19th century Booth theatrical family from Maryland and by the 1860s was a popular actor, well known in both the Northern United States and the South. He was also a Confederate sympathizer who was vehement in his denunciation of the Lincoln Administration and outraged by the South's defeat in the American Civil War. He strongly opposed the abolition of slavery in the United States and Lincoln's proposal to extend voting rights to recently emancipated slaves. Booth, and a group of co-conspirators whom he led, planned to kill Abraham Lincoln, Vice President Andrew Johnson, and Secretary of State William Seward in a desperate bid to help the tottering Confederacy's cause. Although Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia had surrendered four days earlier, Booth believed the war was not yet over since Confederate General Joseph Johnston's army was still fighting the Union Army under General William Tecumseh Sherman. Of the conspirators, only Booth was successful in carrying out his part of the plot. (via Wikipedia)