Evaluating John Wilkes Booth’s Validity in Goals Many people know that Abraham Lincoln was assassinated and remember him as a martyr who died for the Union. Yet few remember who the assassin was. Indeed, John Wilkes Booth, an actor from the South, lead a few conspirators into participating in an assassination scheme: He planned the logistics of the killings, assigned tasks and roles, and chose to personally carry out the most intensive event—a plot to kill the president in Ford’s Theater. He had hoped to give the South some leverage in the Civil War, but more importantly, be remembered as a hero. Killing the leaders of the country “would, they hoped, incite the Confederacy to continue the war against the Union” (Swanson 26-27). Even
