John Wilkes Booth was an American actor and assassin, who murdered President Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C. on April 14, 1865. Booth was a member of the prominent 19th-century Booth theatrical family from Maryland and, by the 1860s, was a well-known actor. He was also a Confederate sympathizer, vehement in his denunciation of Lincoln, and strongly opposed to the abolition of slavery in the United States.















