The assassination of Abraham Lincoln
Lincoln’s assassination is arguably one of the most infamous moments in United States history. On the night of April 14, 1865, Booth snuck into the president’s box at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C., where Lincoln; his wife, Mary; and their guests, Clara Harris and Major Henry Rathbone, were watching a production of Our American Cousin.
At a moment when Booth knew the audience would burst into laughter, he shot Lincoln in the back of the head. Rathbone tried to subdue Booth, but the assassin attacked him with a knife. As Booth tried to escape, he got caught on a portrait of George Washington and an American flag hanging from the box, leading him to land inelegantly on the stage. Before leaving the theater, he shouted “Sic semper tyrannis”—the Virginia state motto, which translates to “Thus always to tyrants.” Lincoln died at 7:22 the next morning.
The subsequent search for Booth followed Lincoln’s killer from Washington to Maryland and Virginia. Helmed by Stanton, the investigation uncovered the Confederate sympathizer’s larger plot: On the night of the assassination, one of Booth’s co-conspirators, Lewis Powell, attempted to murder Secretary of State William H. Seward. Another man, George Atzerodt, was tasked with killing Vice President Andrew Johnson but failed to go through with the actor’s plan.
“Many will blame me for what I am about to do, but posterity, I am sure, will justify me,” Booth wrote in a letter to a friend before the assassination. Only the first half of his prediction proved correct: Stanton and his team immediately began sending out telegrams rallying soldiers and detectives to hunt down Booth.
The making of “Manhunt”
“Manhunt” showrunner Monica Beletsky traces the series’ origins to her research on Harriet Tubman. The abolitionist was friends with Seward, who shared her commitment to ending slavery. “That [connection] led me to find out that essentially, we had no president between the moment Booth shot Lincoln and the next day when Johnson was sworn in,” Beletsky says.
Though Seward survived Powell’s attack, he was in no shape to lead the nation in the immediate aftermath of the assassination; Johnson, meanwhile, “remained in the background and chose not to assert himself,” allowing Stanton to take the lead in the manhunt, according to Swanson’s book. “Learning that the presidency fell on the shoulders of Stanton as de facto president, essentially, for those 12 hours or so was a dramatic situation I was really compelled by,” Beletsky says.
