John Wilkes Booth – 1838-1865

No name is more infamous in American history than that of John Wilkes Booth, a matinee idol, whose sympathies with the Confederate cause in the Civil War prompted him to assassinate Abraham Lincoln on April 14, 1865. After shooting the president as he watched a performance at Washington’s Ford’s Theatre, Booth made his escape and remained at large for eleven days until, cornered in a Virginia tobacco barn, he was fatally shot.