By then he had already found the politics that would carry him forward. In his second state house campaign in 1834 he ran as a Whig, inspired by Henry Clay, and finished second among thirteen candidates. He served four terms in the Illinois House of Representatives for Sangamon County, championing the Illinois and Michigan Canal, supporting the chartering of the Illinois State Bank, and helping move the state capital from Vandalia to Springfield. He also voted to expand suffrage beyond White landowners to all White men, which marked him as a politician of broadening participation, though not yet of full equality. The Whigs favoured banks, tariffs, railroads, and internal improvements, and Lincoln learned to speak their language with a frontier plainness that made policy sound like common sense.

The murder of Elijah Parish Lovejoy in 1837 sharpened him. On 27 January 1838, in Springfield, he delivered the Lyceum Address, ostensibly a civic speech but in truth an attack on mob violence, anti-abolitionism, racial bigotry, Stephen A. Douglas, and the Democratic Party’s tolerance of what Whigs called mobocracy. It was an early sign of the deeper Lincoln, the one who believed law had to stand above the passions of the crowd. Even in those years he could be embarrassed by his own sharpness. A planned duel with James Shields, after Lincoln had mocked him in letters published under the name Aunt Rebecca, never took place, but the affair damaged him in the press. The future president was already learning how words could cut.

In Springfield he practised law under John T. Stuart, then with Stephen T. Logan, and from 1844 with William Herndon. His work touched nearly every sort of prairie case: river barges, bridges, property disputes, commercial quarrels, and the legal tangles of a rapidly expanding West. In 1849 he received a patent for a flotation device to lift riverboats in shallow water, the only patent ever held by a U.S. president. He appeared before the Illinois Supreme Court in 411 cases. From 1853 to 1860 the Illinois Central Railroad was one of his biggest clients, and he even sued it successfully to recover his fees. There was nothing grand about it, only hard work, sharp memory, and a gift for seeing both the law and the man across the table.

Some of his courtroom work became legend. In 1858 he defended William Duff Armstrong, charged with murdering James Preston Metzker, and used a Farmers’ Almanac to show that moonlight could not have illuminated the scene as a witness had claimed. Armstrong was acquitted. In 1859 he defended Peachy Quinn Harrison, grandson of Peter Cartwright, against a murder charge after Harrison was said to have been forgiven by the dying Greek Crafton. Lincoln argued that this was a dying declaration and not hearsay, and the judge admitted it, leading to acquittal. These cases mattered because they showed Lincoln as a lawyer of fact, timing, and persuasion, a man who could turn an almanac or a rule of evidence into the hinge of a life.

His private life moved fitfully beside the public one. Some historians identify Ann Rutledge, a young woman from Kentucky whom he met in New Salem, as his first great affection. She died of typhoid fever on 25 August 1835, and Lincoln fell into a serious depression, even contemplating suicide. Later he was briefly engaged to Mary Owens, also from Kentucky, after she came to New Salem in November 1836, but the match collapsed and he wrote to her on 16 August 1837 saying he would not blame her if she ended it. In 1839 he met Mary Todd in Springfield, daughter of Robert Smith Todd of Lexington, Kentucky. They became engaged in 1840, broke it off in early 1841, then reconciled and married on 4 November 1842. Their Springfield house, bought in 1844 near his law office, would become a place of turbulence, with Mary often verbally abusive and sometimes physically violent.

The Lincolns had four sons, and the house was marked by grief as much as by ambition. Robert Todd Lincoln was born in 1843 and alone lived to maturity. Edward Baker Lincoln, born in 1846, died on 1 February 1850, probably of tuberculosis. William Wallace, called Willie, was born on 21 December 1850 and died of fever in the White House on 20 February 1862. Thomas, known as Tad, was born on 4 April 1853 and died of edema at eighteen on 16 July 1871. Lincoln loved children, and the family was not strict with its own, but the deaths of Eddie and Willie struck both parents hard. Lincoln himself suffered from melancholy, now thought to be clinical depression, and the shadow of sorrow often sat beside him even at the height of power.

For a while he kept one foot in politics and the other in law. In 1843 he sought the Whig nomination for Illinois’s 7th district in the U.S. House of Representatives, though John J. Hardin won the seat. Lincoln still persuaded the party to limit Hardin to one term, and in 1846 he won the nomination and the election himself. As the only Whig in the Illinois delegation, he served on the Committee on Post Office and Post Roads and the Committee on Expenditures in the War Department. He joined Joshua R. Giddings on a bill to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, though he dropped it when it failed to win much support. Even then he was edging towards the great question of his age.

The Mexican-American War turned him into a more visible critic of national policy. He opposed the war, saying President James K. Polk had some strong motive to involve the two countries in conflict and hide it behind the brightness of military glory, that attractive rainbow that rises in showers of blood. He supported the Wilmot Proviso, which would have barred slavery from territories taken from Mexico. When Polk claimed Mexican soldiers had invaded Texas, Lincoln replied in his 1847 spot resolutions, asking for the exact spot where the blood had been shed. The administration never answered, and newspapers mocked him as spotty Lincoln. The cost of honesty in politics was already becoming clear.

He had promised in 1846 to serve only one term in the House, and he kept that promise. At the 1848 Whig National Convention he backed Henry Clay, then shifted to Zachary Taylor when Clay could not prevail. When Taylor won the presidency, Lincoln hoped for appointment as commissioner of the General Land Office, but was instead offered secretary of the Oregon Territory. He declined, unwilling to uproot his legal life in Illinois, and returned to practice. That decision left him where he was strongest: among clients, courts, and the growing moral crisis over slavery that the nation kept trying to postpone.

The crisis sharpened after the Compromise of 1850 failed to settle the slavery dispute. Stephen A. Douglas proposed popular sovereignty in the Nebraska and Kansas territories, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act passed Congress in May 1854, opening the door to slavery where many Northerners had expected it to be excluded. Lincoln’s Peoria Speech of October 1854 marked his return to politics with force. Over the next six years he delivered about 175 speeches against the extension of slavery into the territories. He wrote in 1855 that he thought himself a Whig, though others called him an abolitionist, and he declared that he did no more than oppose the extension of slavery. The old party was breaking apart, and from its wreckage the Republican Party emerged.

Lincoln resisted the first Republican overtures, fearing it would become a platform for extreme abolitionists. He still hoped to revive the Whigs, even as he lamented their closeness to the nativist Know Nothing movement. In 1854 he was elected to the Illinois legislature but declined to take his seat so he could run for the U.S. Senate. At that time senators were chosen by state legislatures. He led in the first six rounds, then told his supporters to back Lyman Trumbull, an anti-slavery Democrat with few earlier votes. The switch let Whigs and anti-slavery Democrats combine to defeat Joel Aldrich Matteson. Lincoln had not yet won the Senate, but he had shown he could trade ambition for coalition.

The Bloomington Convention of 1856 brought him fully into the new Republican Party. Violence in Kansas had made the Kansas-Nebraska Act a living wound, and the Illinois Republicans endorsed Congress’s power to regulate slavery in the territories and admitted Kansas as a free state. Lincoln delivered the final speech, calling for the preservation of the Union. That summer he was considered for vice president at the Republican National Convention, though John C. Frémont and William Dayton took the ticket. Lincoln supported them through Illinois while James Buchanan won the presidency and William Henry Bissell became governor. He was no longer a local curiosity. He was becoming the voice of a party.

The Dred Scott decision of 1857 gave him the larger enemy he had been waiting for. Dred Scott, an enslaved man taken into free territory under the Missouri Compromise and then returned to slavery, had sued for freedom and lost. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney declared the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional because it violated slaveholders’ property rights. Lincoln denounced the decision as part of a Democratic conspiracy to strengthen the Slave Power, and he set it against the Declaration of Independence and its promise that all men are created equal. He had found the argument that would define him: not merely legal opposition to slavery, but a moral and constitutional claim that the republic could not endure half slave and half free.

In 1858 Lincoln won the Republican nomination to challenge Douglas for the U.S. Senate. He answered with the House Divided Speech, declaring that a house divided against itself cannot stand and that the government could not endure permanently half slave and half free. Douglas, who understood the danger, called him the strong man of the party. The debates that followed were seven in number, public, crowded, and fierce, like prizefights with words instead of fists. Lincoln accused Douglas of distorting Jefferson’s claim of human equality, while Douglas defended popular sovereignty in his Freeport Doctrine. He won the seat in the legislature, but Lincoln won something larger: a national reputation.

The debates made him a presidential possibility. Newspapers now mentioned him as a contender, especially after his performance in 1858 and his role in building the Illinois Republican Party. In January 1860 he told allies he would accept the nomination if offered. Local papers such as William O. Stoddard’s Central Illinois Gazette and the Chicago Press & Tribune backed him. Henry Ward Beecher invited him to speak in Brooklyn, and the invitation led to the Cooper Union address in Manhattan on 27 February 1860. There Lincoln argued that the Founding Fathers had limited slavery in the territories through the Northwest Ordinance and that morality required opposition to slavery, not some middle ground between right and wrong. Noah Brooks said no man had ever made such an impression on his first appeal to a New York audience, and Lincoln quietly admitted that the taste was in his mouth a little.

In May 1860, at Decatur and then at the Republican National Convention in Chicago, his allies sold the frontier legend with great skill. He became the Rail Candidate, the man who had split fence rails and cleared land with his own hands. On 18 May he won the nomination on the third ballot, and Hannibal Hamlin of Maine was chosen as his running mate to balance the ticket. The election was fractured. Douglas led the Northern Democrats, John C. Breckinridge the Southern Democrats, and John Bell the Constitutional Union men. Wide Awakes clubs turned the contest into one of the most excited elections in American history. Lincoln himself made no speeches, but his image as a self-made man carried the North and West.

On 6 November 1860 he was elected the first Republican president with 1,866,452 votes, 39.8 percent of the total in a four-way race, and a decisive electoral victory. He carried the free Northern states, California, and Oregon, but received no ballots in ten of the fifteen Southern slave states. That result did not merely elect a man; it broke the Union’s political balance. South Carolina seceded on 20 December 1860, and by 1 February 1861 Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas had followed. Six of those states formed the Confederate States of America and chose Jefferson Davis as their provisional president. The upper South and border states hesitated, but the country was already splitting apart.

Lincoln and Buchanan refused to recognise the Confederacy, and Lincoln rejected the Crittenden Compromise, saying he would suffer death before consenting to any concession that looked like buying the privilege to take possession of the government. He did, however, support the Corwin Amendment, which would have protected slavery where it already existed. On 4 March 1861, in his first inaugural address, he said he had no objection to making that protection express and irrevocable. He also tried to reassure the South that he had no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with slavery in the states where it existed. Yet he ended by asking the people of the South to remember that we are not enemies, but friends, and he closed with the mystic chords of memory and the better angels of our nature.

His journey to Washington was shadowed by danger. Because of secessionist plots, his train was watched carefully, and he evaded suspected assassins in Baltimore by travelling in disguise, wearing a soft felt hat instead of his usual stovepipe and hunching under an overcoat to hide his height. He arrived in Washington on 23 February 1861, and the city was placed under military guard. Opposition newspapers mocked him as secretive and furtive, but he had reached the capital alive. The country around him was not at peace. The Peace Conference of 1861 failed to attract seven Confederate states, and compromise was becoming an empty word.

To govern, Lincoln assembled what Doris Kearns Goodwin later called a team of rivals. He chose the strongest men of the party, even those who had opposed him. William H. Seward became Secretary of State, despite having been his chief rival for the nomination. Lincoln believed the country needed the best talents and the widest political balance. He also reshaped the federal judiciary, appointing Noah Haynes Swayne, Samuel Freeman Miller, David Davis, Stephen Johnson Field, and later Salmon P. Chase as chief justice after Roger B. Taney’s death. Chase, once his treasury secretary, was expected to support Reconstruction and help unite Republicans. Lincoln was already thinking beyond war, even as war approached.

The war began at Fort Sumter in Charleston harbour. Major Robert Anderson reported in early April 1861 that he was nearly out of food, and Lincoln decided to send provisions. On 12 April Confederate forces opened fire. The choice had been carefully boxed in by Lincoln’s refusal to strike first and his refusal to surrender the forts. On 15 April he called for 75,000 militiamen to recapture federal property, protect Washington, and preserve the Union. That call forced states to choose. North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, and Arkansas seceded. On 19 April mobs in Baltimore attacked Union troops changing trains, and Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus, allowing arrests without formal charge. John Merryman challenged the policy, and Chief Justice Taney ruled in Ex parte Merryman that only Congress could suspend habeas corpus. Lincoln ignored the ruling and kept the suspension in selected areas.

Those early months established the shape of his command. He expanded war powers, imposed a naval blockade on Confederate ports, disbursed funds before Congress could appropriate them, and arrested thousands of suspected Confederate sympathisers. He needed support from Congress and the North, but he also had to keep the border slave states loyal and prevent Britain or France from entering the war. On 6 August 1861 he signed the Confiscation Act, authorising courts to seize and free slaves used in support of the Confederacy. The measure had limited practical effect, but it signalled that the war was changing. Lincoln was still trying to hold the Union together without provoking its collapse, while Copperheads denounced him for not compromising and Radical Republicans for moving too slowly against slavery.

His approach to the army was equally deliberate. Twice a week he met with his cabinet, and Mary sometimes urged him to take a carriage ride because he worked too hard. He selected generals from varied political and ethnic backgrounds to widen support for the war effort. After Simon Cameron’s failures and accusations of corruption, Lincoln replaced him with Edwin Stanton in January 1862. Stanton became his closest wartime collaborator, and the two men virtually conducted the war together. Lincoln also watched the Mississippi closely, understanding that Vicksburg mattered as much as any battlefield. He valued Winfield Scott’s Anaconda Plan, even visiting West Point in June 1862 to consult with the retired general about strategy.

The first great military frustrations came under George B. McClellan. After the Union rout at Bull Run, Lincoln made him general-in-chief. McClellan built formidable defences around Washington, 48 forts and batteries with 480 guns, but he moved too slowly in Virginia. Lincoln grew impatient, and in 1862 he removed him as general-in-chief, elevating Henry Halleck and then John Pope. Pope was defeated badly at the Second Battle of Bull Run and the Army of Virginia was dissolved. Lincoln restored McClellan to command around Washington, only to watch Robert E. Lee cross the Potomac into Maryland and fight the bloody Battle of Antietam. McClellan won the field but refused to pursue Lee, and Lincoln again had to decide whether to keep faith or change commanders.

He changed them. Don Carlos Buell was replaced by William Rosecrans, McClellan by Ambrose Burnside, and Burnside then launched a disastrous offensive across the Rappahannock and was beaten at Fredericksburg in December 1862. Lincoln replaced him with Joseph Hooker, who suffered heavy losses at Chancellorsville and resigned in June 1863, making way for George Meade. Meade defeated Lee at Gettysburg but failed to block the Confederate retreat, while Ulysses S. Grant captured Vicksburg and secured the Mississippi. In May 1863 Lincoln issued the Lieber Code, defining wartime conduct and command responsibility. The war was becoming not just a contest of armies, but a struggle to define the rules of a republic at war.

The Emancipation Proclamation was the most important political turning point of his presidency. Two Union generals had issued emancipation orders in 1861 and 1862, but Lincoln overrode them, fearing they lacked authority and might drive loyal border states into secession. Congress had already banned slavery in federal territories in June 1862, and the Confiscation Act of that year allowed seizure of slaves from disloyal owners. On 22 July 1862 Lincoln reviewed a draft proclamation with his cabinet. Horace Greeley urged him publicly to embrace emancipation, and in August Lincoln answered that his paramount object was to save the Union, not to save or destroy slavery. If he could save the Union without freeing any slave, he would do it; if by freeing all, he would do that too.

After Antietam, he issued the preliminary proclamation on 22 September 1862, then the final version on 1 January 1863. It declared the slaves in the states in rebellion free, while exempting areas under Union control. Lincoln said he had never felt more certain that he was doing right than when signing it. On New Year’s Eve, Black people across the United States held Watch Night ceremonies, waiting for Freedom’s Eve to become reality. The proclamation did not end slavery everywhere, but it made abolition a war aim and opened the way for thousands to escape bondage as Union armies advanced south. Copperheads denounced it, and some Southern Unionists saw betrayal, yet enlistment of freedmen became official policy, and Lincoln told Andrew Johnson that fifty thousand armed black soldiers on the Mississippi would end the rebellion at once.

On 19 November 1863, at Gettysburg, he spoke with extraordinary brevity. The battlefield cemetery dedication gave him the chance to say that the nation had been conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. He asked that the dead not have died in vain, and he promised a new birth of freedom and government of the people, by the people, for the people. The speech became the most quoted in American history. After Farragut took New Orleans and the twin victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, Lincoln also proclaimed a national Thanksgiving holiday for the final Thursday in November 1863. The war was now being narrated into a national memory even before it had ended.

Grant’s rise became Lincoln’s great military bet. Shiloh and Vicksburg impressed him, and when critics attacked Grant after Shiloh, Lincoln answered, I can’t spare this man. He fights. After Gettysburg and Chattanooga he promoted Grant to commander of all Union armies. Grant’s Overland Campaign in 1864 was brutal, with about 55,000 Union casualties and about 33,000 Confederate, but it forced Lee back. Lincoln supported attacks on plantations, railroads, and bridges to weaken the South, while insisting that destroying armies mattered more than destruction for its own sake. In early April 1865 Richmond fell, the Confederate government fled, and Lincoln visited the conquered capital. The war was nearly over, and the city he had once entered in disguise was now his by right of victory.

Even in war he governed as if the future mattered. On 30 June 1864 he signed the Yosemite Grant, giving unprecedented federal protection to the area now known as Yosemite National Park. At the same time he struggled to fund the war. After Bull Run collapsed the bond market, Congress passed the Revenue Act of 1861, creating the first federal income tax at three percent on incomes above $800. The Morrill Tariff raised import duties, the Legal Tender Act of 1862 created $150 million in greenbacks, and the Revenue Act of 1862 added excise taxes, an inheritance tax, and a progressive income tax. The national debt soared, but the Union kept paying. Lincoln also signed the False Claims Act of 1863 to fight fraud, and the National Banking Act of 1863 to stabilise currency through national banks and federal notes.

He also changed the nation’s land and learning. The Homestead Act of 1862 opened millions of acres of western land to low-cost purchase. The Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act funded agricultural colleges in each state. The Pacific Railway Acts of 1862 and 1864 backed the first transcontinental railroad, completed in 1869. Lincoln’s war presidency was not only about armies and proclamations; it was about making a modern federal state. Even his taxation reflected that. Congress argued over whether to lean on tariffs or income taxes, and by the end of the war the income tax supplied about one-fifth of federal revenue. What had begun in emergency became the architecture of a new government.

Foreign policy was a constant danger. Russia alone supported the Union outright, while Britain and France were tempted by Confederate hopes and by their own imperial ambitions. Lincoln knew little of diplomacy by training, but he exerted great influence through Seward and Charles Sumner. The Trent Affair of 1861 nearly brought war with Britain when the U.S. Navy seized two Confederate envoys from a British mail ship, but Lincoln released them and cooled the crisis. He also sent diplomats to keep Europe neutral, and he succeeded. The Emancipation Proclamation helped turn European opinion toward the Union, and the victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg in July 1863 ended any serious prospect of intervention. France’s puppet regime in Mexico and Spain’s actions in the Dominican Republic only underlined how fragile the wider world had become.

In the West, Lincoln’s government faced the Dakota War of 1862 in Minnesota, a grim collision of treaty violations, unfair trading, and starvation. Hundreds of settlers were killed and 30,000 displaced. Fearing a wider conspiracy, Lincoln ordered paroled prisoners of war to be sent, then revoked the order when the Confederacy protested. He appointed John Pope to command the Department of the Northwest, and Henry Hastings Sibley eventually defeated Little Crow at Wood Lake. A military trial sentenced 303 Dakota warriors to death. Lincoln reviewed the cases personally and pardoned all but 39, with one execution suspended so that 38 were hanged in the largest mass execution in U.S. history. When Alexander Ramsey suggested he would gain votes by hanging all 303, Lincoln answered, I could not afford to hang men for votes. The line was typical of him, practical and severe at once.

The road to a second term looked uncertain in 1864. The Democratic nominee was George B. McClellan, once his general, and Lincoln ran with Andrew Johnson, a War Democrat, under the new National Union Party label. Grant’s stalemates and Confederate successes, including the Battle of the Crater, weakened Republican hopes. Lincoln even wrote a confidential memorandum saying that if he lost, he would co-operate with the President-elect to save the Union between the election and inauguration. Then Atlanta fell in September and the Shenandoah Valley in October, and public opinion turned. He won re-election with 55.1 percent of the vote and 212 electoral votes to McClellan’s 21. The nation had chosen war to the end.

Peace talks followed, but not on equal terms. On 3 February 1865 Alexander H. Stephens and two other Confederate officials met Lincoln and Seward at Hampton Roads. Lincoln refused to treat the Confederacy as a coequal government, and the only result was agreement on prisoner exchange. By then his second inaugural address, delivered on 4 March 1865, had already set the moral tone of the endgame. With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, he urged the nation to bind up its wounds and care for those who had borne the battle, and for their widow and orphan. It is one of the great closing statements in American politics, not triumphant, but chastened.

Reconstruction had begun before the guns fell silent. Lincoln had already issued an Amnesty Proclamation on 8 December 1863, offering pardons to many who would swear allegiance. He told one general, Let ’em up easy, and opposed the Radicals led by Thaddeus Stevens, Charles Sumner, and Benjamin Wade when they pushed harsher measures. In Tennessee and Arkansas he appointed Andrew Johnson and Frederick Steele as military governors. In Louisiana he backed Nathaniel P. Banks and a plan to restore statehood once 10 percent of voters agreed, so long as slavery was abolished. The Radicals answered with the Wade-Davis Bill, which he pocket-vetoed. He wanted speedy elections and reunion, not punishment for punishment’s sake.

He also pressed for constitutional abolition. By December 1863 an amendment had been brought before Congress. The Senate passed it on 8 April 1864, but the House fell short until after his re-election. On 31 January 1865 the House finally passed what became the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery and involuntary servitude except as punishment for crime, and ratification followed in December 1865 after his death. Lincoln also signed Charles Sumner’s Freedmen’s Bureau bill, creating a temporary agency to meet the immediate needs of former slaves and allowing leases with the prospect of purchase. It was not forty acres and a mule, but it was an acknowledgment that the federal government owed something material to millions of freed people. By the end of his life he seemed to be edging, cautiously, towards broader rights for them.

Yet the man who had held the Union together could not hold the theatre box shut. Booth, a well-known actor and Confederate spy from Maryland, attended Lincoln’s last public address on 11 April 1865, where Lincoln spoke in favour of limited Black suffrage, especially for the very intelligent and those who had served as soldiers. Booth decided on murder. He learned that Lincoln and Grant might attend a play together, and he planned to kill both at Ford’s Theatre. Grant went to New Jersey instead. At 10:15 pm on 14 April Booth entered the box, crept up behind Lincoln, and fired. Rathbone fought him off and was stabbed. Booth escaped into the night, and Lincoln was carried to Petersen House, where he died nine hours later.

The nation responded with a mourning fit for a king and a republic at once. From 19 to 20 April Lincoln lay in state in the White House and then the Capitol rotunda. His body and Willie’s travelled on a funeral train for two weeks from Washington to Springfield, Illinois, stopping at cities where hundreds of thousands came to pay respects. Along the tracks people stood with bands, bonfires, hymn singing, or in silence. Some who had hated him celebrated his death, but the greater sound was grief. Walt Whitman wrote four elegies, including When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d and O Captain! My Captain! Lincoln was buried at Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield, and now lies in the Lincoln Tomb. The man who began in a cabin had come home as a national martyr.

What followed was memory, argument, and monument. In surveys of scholars since 1948, Lincoln has usually stood with George Washington and Franklin D. Roosevelt among the highest-rated presidents. The 1922 dedication of the Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall marked a high point in his civic afterlife. He appears on the penny and the five-dollar bill, on stamps across the world, and in places as varied as Nebraska’s capital, Mount Rushmore, Lincoln Park in Chicago, and Parliament Square in London. He became Honest Abe, the Great Emancipator, and for some a contested figure whose record was debated anew in the late twentieth century. But the final fact remains the same: on 15 April 1865, at 7:22 am, Abraham Lincoln died after being shot at Ford’s Theatre, the first U.S. president to be assassinated.