In the beginning…
April 14, 2011 § Leave a comment
I open this on 14 April, the date in 1865 on which Lincoln is murdered. John Wilkes Booth, an actor and Confederate spy, shot President Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C., five days after Confederate General Robert E. Lee had surrendered what remained of his formerly massive army at Appomattox Court House, Virginia. That surrender concluded major hostilities of the War of Southern Secession which the Confederate States had begun at 4:30 a.m. on April 12, 1861, by shelling Fort Sumter, Charleston, S.C. Lincoln was murdered because, in a speech at the White House delivered on 11 April 1865 he publicly endorsed enfranchising the recently-freed slaves. John Wilkes Booth, who was present and heard Lincoln’s speech said to his companion and then-friend, Louis Weichmann: “That means nigger citizenship. Now by God I’ll put him through! That is the last speech he will ever make.” Weichmann was later a witness for the prosecution in the trials of Booth’s co-conspirators.
150 years later the United States’s society, legal system and political system continues to deal, with some successes and many failures, with the vampiric legacy of racism which seems to have remained vibrant in the South and, immediately after the end of the War for Southern Secession, birthed the first terrorist organization of the modern era- the Ku Klux Klan.