American Experience

Narrator: In the early morning of April 21, 1865, a train draped with black bunting slowly departed Washington. In the second-to-last car rode the body of the America’s first assassinated President: Abraham Lincoln. Over the next 12 days, the funeral train would wend its way across the country. Millions paused to stand by railroad sidings, or file past his open casket to glimpse the martyred president’s face.

David Blight, historian: It’s a nation mourning, it’s a people mourning, it’s a whole society mourning, but in the end, they’re mourning the death of a simple man like themselves, who came from a place like they came from.

Harold Holzer, writer: You could not write this from scratch. You could not invent this and make it believable, the life and the death. He’s an authentic hero who is bigger than life, bigger than war, and almost bigger than America by the time he died.

Narrator: At the very moment Lincoln’s funeral train departed Washington, his murderer lay shivering in the reeds beside the banks of the Potomac River. The largest manhunt in American history was closing in and John Wilkes Booth managed to scribble a few words in his diary.

John Wilkes Booth (Will Patton): Our cause being almost lost, something decisive and great must be done. A country groaned beneath this tyranny, and prayed for this end, and yet now behold the cold hands they extend to me. God cannot pardon me if I have done wrong. Yet I cannot see any wrong.

James L. Swanson, writer: It’s often said that Booth killed Lincoln because he was a failed actor, because he went mad. John Wilkes Booth shared political views that were identical to the views held by millions of southerners, hundreds of thousands and likely millions of northerners. John Wilkes Booth was not insane, he was not mad, unless you think the country was mad.