The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln: How One Bullet Changed America

On the morning of April 14, 1865, Abraham Lincoln was the happiest he'd been in years. The war was over. He had a vision for what came next. By the next morning, he was dead. In this episode of A Crime's Ripple Effect, we trace the three great ripples of his assassination: the political ripple that placed Reconstruction in the hands of a man who actively worked to dismantle it, delaying racial justice for a century. The security ripple that took three presidential assassinations over thirty-six years before America finally built the institution we now call the Secret Service. And the myth — how Lincoln's death transformed a divisive wartime president into a symbol larger than the man himself, creating a martyrdom that both inspired the country and obscured the unfinished work his assassination left behind.

Transcript

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On the morning of april fourteenth, eighteen sixty five, Abraham Lincoln was, by multiple accounts, happier than anyone around him had seen him in years. The Civil War was effectively over. General Robert E. Lee had surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox Courthouse just five days earlier. The Union was preserved. The institution of slavery, which had torn the country apart, was dying. Lincoln had looked pale and haggard for months, aged beyond his fifty-six years by the weight of a war that had killed more than six hundred thousand Americans. But on that good Friday morning, something in him had lifted. He told members of his cabinet that he had dreamed of being aboard a strange vessel, moving with great speed toward a dark and distant shore, a dream he said he'd had before every great turning point of the war. He spent the morning reading newspapers, eating breakfast with his family, and meeting with his advisors. In the afternoon, he took a carriage ride with his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, through the streets of Washington. Mary later recalled that her husband had been so cheerful during the ride that she had worried aloud. That kind of talk, she told him, could bring bad luck. That evening, the president and Mary attended a performance of the comedy Our American Cousin at Ford's Theater on Tenth Street in Washington. They were accompanied by two guests, Major Henry Rathbone, a twenty seven-year-old Union officer, and his fiancee Clara Harris, the daughter of a New York senator. They had not been Lincoln's first choice. The Lincolns had originally invited General Ulysses S. Grant and his wife Julia, but the Grants had declined, choosing instead to take a train to visit their children in New Jersey. Others also turned down the invitation before Major Rathbone and Clara Harris accepted. The presidential party arrived at the theater around nine o'clock, after the play had already begun. The orchestra struck up a rendition of Hail to the Chief. The audience rose and applauded. Lincoln smiled and bowed, then took his seat in the presidential box, a private balcony draped with flags and decorated with a portrait of George Washington. Outside the door to that box, a single chair sat in the narrow passageway. It was the chair assigned to the president's bodyguard for the evening, a Metropolitan police officer named John Frederick Parker. Parker was supposed to be sitting in that chair, positioned between the door and anyone who might approach. He was not there. He had left his post. And shortly after ten o'clock, an actor named John Wilkes Booth walked through that unguarded passageway, wedged the outer door shut behind him with the broken leg of a music stand he had placed there earlier that day, raised a small Derringer pistol, and fired a single bullet into the back of Abraham Lincoln's head. Lincoln never regained consciousness. He was carried across the street to a boarding house owned by a tailor named William Peterson, where doctors laid him diagonally across a bed too short for his six foot four frame. Throughout the night, government officials, military officers, and members of Lincoln's cabinet gathered in the small room and in the parlor, watching as the president slowly died. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, tears streaming down his face, began directing what would become the largest manhunt in American history up to that point. At 722 on the morning of April 15, 1865, Abraham Lincoln was pronounced dead. He was the first American president to be assassinated. Outside the city was unraveling. Word of the shooting had spread through Washington within minutes, carried from person to person through the streets, into saloons and boarding houses and hotel lobbies. Church bells began to toll. Crowds gathered outside Ford's Theater and outside the Peterson House, standing in the darkness, waiting for news. Soldiers on horseback galloped through the streets, shouting orders and sealing off bridges. Rumors flew in every direction, that the entire cabinet had been murdered, that a Confederate army was marching on the Capitol, that the assassination was the opening act of a second rebellion. By dawn, black crepe was appearing on door frames and windowsills across the city. Strangers wept openly on street corners. The jubilation that had filled Washington just days earlier, the celebration of Lee's surrender and the end of the war, had been replaced by something closer to collective shock, a grief so sudden and so total that people struggled to process what had happened. The bullet that killed him was a lead ball less than half an inch in diameter, fired from a single shot pistol small enough to conceal in a man's palm. But the ripple of that bullet would alter the trajectory of an entire nation. It would profoundly alter the course of reconstruction and place the fate of four million newly freed black Americans in the hands of a man who had no interest in protecting their rights. It would expose the catastrophic absence of any system for protecting the President of the United States, a failure so profound that it would take two more presidential assassinations before the country finally addressed it. And it would transform Abraham Lincoln in death into something he had never been in life. A figure of universal reverence, a martyr whose memory would be invoked by every subsequent generation to justify causes he could never have imagined. This is the story of that bullet, and this is the story of everything it set in motion. Every ripple starts with something that sets it in motion. In crime, it often begins with a life lost. I go back to when and how the crime occurred, how the ripple began, the impact it left behind, and the person who should be remembered. I'm glad you're here. You're listening to A Crimes Ripple Effect. John Wilkes Booth was 26 years old on the night he killed Lincoln. He was a member of one of the most distinguished acting families in 19th century America. His father, Junius Brutus Booth, was a celebrated Shakespearean actor who had emigrated from England. His older brother, Edwin Booth, was widely considered the greatest American stage performer of the era. John Wilkes himself was talented, handsome, charismatic, and by 1864 was earning roughly $20,000 a year from his performances, an extraordinary sum at a time when the average Northern family earned about $300 annually. He was also a committed white supremacist and a passionate Confederate sympathizer who had spent the war years growing increasingly embittered by the Union's military victories and by Lincoln's policies regarding emancipation and black citizenship. On April 11, 1865, just three days before the assassination, Lincoln delivered a speech from a White House window in which he publicly endorsed for the first time, extending the right to vote to at least some black men, specifically those who were educated and those who had served in the Union military. Booth was in the crowd that evening. He turned to a companion and reportedly declared that this meant citizenship for black people, and that it would be the last speech Lincoln ever made. Booth had originally conceived not of assassination but of kidnapping. His plan had been to abduct Lincoln, smuggle him across Confederate lines, and ransom him for the release of Confederate prisoners of war. He assembled a small band of conspirators, including Lewis Powell, a 20-year-old former Confederate soldier, David Harold, a 22-year-old pharmacy clerk, George Atsarot, a 29-year-old German-born carriage painter who had ferried Confederate spies during the war, and several others. A kidnapping attempt was planned for March 17, 1865, but Lincoln changed his schedule at the last moment and the plot collapsed. By April, with Lee's surrender and the Confederacy in its death throes, Booth's ambition shifted from kidnapping to something far more radical. He conceived a plan to decapitate the Union government in a single coordinated strike. On the evening of April 14th, Booth would kill Lincoln at Ford's Theater. Simultaneously, Powell and Harold would go to the home of Secretary of State William Seward, who was bedridden after a carriage accident, and murder him. Atsarot would go to the Kirkwood House Hotel, where Vice President Andrew Johnson was staying and kill him there. By eliminating the president, the vice president, and the Secretary of State, Booth believed he could throw the federal government into chaos and create an opening for the Confederacy to reconstitute itself. The plan partially succeeded and partially failed, in ways that would prove to have enormous consequences. Booth killed Lincoln. Powell invaded Seward's home and attacked the bedridden Secretary of State with a bowie knife, stabbing him repeatedly and slashing open his face and neck. Seward's life was saved by a metal jaw splint he was wearing to treat injuries from his carriage accident. The splint deflected one of Powell's knife blows from the jugular vein. Powell also wounded Seward's two sons and a bodyguard before fleeing into the night. Seward survived, permanently disfigured but alive. Atsarot, however, lost his nerve entirely. Assigned to kill the vice president, he went to the bar at the Kirkwood House, drank until his courage failed him, and wandered out into the Washington night without ever approaching Johnson's room. The vice president slept through the entire conspiracy, alone and unguarded, never knowing until morning that he had been a target. The fact that Atsarot could not bring himself to knock on Andrew Johnson's door is one of the great pivot points in American history. Had he succeeded, had Johnson died alongside Lincoln that night, the presidency would have passed to the president pro tempore of the Senate, Lafayette Foster of Connecticut, a committed Republican who almost certainly would have pursued Reconstruction with the vigor that Lincoln's own party demanded. Instead, Andrew Johnson survived. And Andrew Johnson's survival may have been the most consequential failure of the entire conspiracy, but before examining what Johnson did with the presidency he inherited, it is necessary to confront a question that is almost incomprehensible from a modern perspective. How was it possible for an assassin to walk into a public theater and shoot the president of the United States? The answer is as simple as it is staggering. In 1865, there was essentially no system for protecting the president. The concept of presidential security as we understand it today, an organized, professional, permanent apparatus dedicated to shielding the nation's leader from harm, did not exist. The president was, for all practical purposes, as accessible to the public as any other citizen. Lincoln regularly walked the streets of Washington unescorted. He rode his horse alone for three miles each way to his summer retreat at the soldier's home on the outskirts of the city. In August of 1864, while making that solitary ride, a bullet had passed through his top hat, coming within inches of killing him. Lincoln treated the incident as a joke and asked the soldier who retrieved the hat to keep it quiet. Lincoln's closest friend and self-appointed protector was Ward Hill Lehman, a strapping Virginian who had been Lincoln's law partner in Illinois. Lehman, who served as United States Marshal for the District of Columbia, was so alarmed by the constant threats against the president that he slept on the floor outside Lincoln's bedroom door on the night of the inauguration. Armed with pistols and a bowie knife, he repeatedly begged Lincoln to take his safety seriously. Lincoln dismissed his concerns with characteristic fatalism. He told Lehman that he considered him insane on the subject of presidential security, and that if someone truly wanted to kill him, it would be almost impossible to prevent it. When Lehman pressed the point, Lincoln once responded with a shrug and a biblical allusion. He said that the Lord had preserved him through the war, and he supposed he would continue to do so. In the fall of 1864, at Lehman's insistence, the Metropolitan Police Department of Washington created a small detail of officers to provide some measure of protection for the president. The detail consisted of just four men, rotating in shifts. They were not trained for protective work. They were not screened for reliability. They were simply police officers pulled from their regular duties and told to stay near the president. One of those four officers was John Frederick Parker. Parker's record as a police officer was, by any reasonable measure, disqualifying. He had been hauled before the police disciplinary board repeatedly on charges that included sleeping on duty, being drunk on duty, visiting a house of prostitution, firing a pistol through a window, and using abusive language. When charged with sleeping on a streetcar instead of walking his beat, Parker told the board he had heard ducks quacking on the tram and had climbed aboard to investigate. The charge was dismissed. When charged with visiting a brothel, he explained that the proprietress had sent for him. That charge was also dismissed. Despite this record, Parker was assigned to the presidential detail and was on duty the night of april fourteenth. Parker was supposed to relieve the previous guard at four o'clock that afternoon. He arrived three hours late. When the presidential party arrived at Ford's Theater around nine, Parker was seated on the chair outside the presidential box in the narrow passageway that was the only approach to Lincoln's position. From that chair, Parker could not see the stage. After Lincoln and his guests settled into the box, Parker moved to the first gallery so he could watch the play. Then, at intermission, he committed what would become perhaps the most consequential dereliction of duty in American history. He left the theater entirely and went for drinks at the star saloon next door, joining Lincoln's footman and coachman at the bar. When John Wilkes Booth entered Forbes Theater around ten o'clock that evening, Parker's chair was empty. Booth, who was a famous actor and well known at the theater, walked up to the presidential box unchallenged. He presented his calling card to Charles Forbes, Lincoln's footman, who allowed him to enter. Booth wedged the outer door shut with the broken music stand leg he had hidden there earlier in the day, ensuring that no one could follow him in. He opened the inner door to the box. Lincoln was seated in a rocking chair, watching the play, laughing. Booth stepped forward, placed the muzzle of his derringer inches from the back of Lincoln's head, and pulled the trigger. Major Rathbone lunged at Booth, who slashed him with a knife, cutting his arm to the bone. Booth then vaulted over the railing of the box and dropped roughly twelve feet to the stage below, breaking his left fibula on landing. He reportedly shouted something. Accounts vary between the Virginia State motto and a declaration that the South was avenged, and then hobbled across the stage, out the back door to the alley, mounted a horse that was being held for him, and rode into the Maryland night. The manhunt that followed was the largest in American history to that point. Thousands of Federal troops flooded the countryside of southern Maryland and Northern Virginia. After twelve days on the run, Booth and David Harold were cornered at a tobacco farm. Harold surrendered. Booth refused. The soldiers set the barn on fire and Sergeant Boston Corbett shot Booth through a gap in the wall. The bullet severed Booth's spinal cord. He was dragged from the burning building paralyzed. He reportedly asked someone to hold up his hand so he could see them. His last words were said to be useless, useless. He died on the porch of the farmhouse as dawn broke on april twenty sixth, eighteen sixty five. Eight conspirators were tried before a military tribunal rather than a civilian court. A decision made by Secretary of War Stanton and Attorney General James Speed that would have lasting repercussions for American law. The choice to use a military commission was controversial at the time and remains debated by legal scholars. The defendants were civilians, and the civilian courts in Washington were functioning normally. Critics argued that trying civilians before a military panel, where the rules of evidence were looser and there was no right to a jury of peers, violated fundamental constitutional protections. Supporters countered that the assassination was an act of war carried out by agents of a belligerent power, and that military jurisdiction was appropriate. The precedent established by the Lincoln conspiracy trial would echo through subsequent American conflicts, from the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II to the military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay after September 11, 2001. Every time the United States has debated the boundaries between military and civilian justice in the context of national security, the ghost of the Lincoln trial has been present in the argument. Four of the conspirators, Powell, Harold, Atsarat, and Mary Surrat, were sentenced to death by hanging. Surratt's case was particularly controversial. She owned the boarding house where the conspirators had met, and while evidence tied her to the kidnapping plot, her direct involvement in the assassination itself was disputed. Five of the nine military commissioners recommended clemency for her, asking President Johnson to commute her sentence to life imprisonment. Johnson later claimed he never saw the clemency petition. Others insisted he had seen it and ignored it. Mary Surratt was hanged on July 7, 1865, becoming the first woman executed by the United States federal government, a distinction that added another layer of controversy to an already contentious proceeding. The executions were carried out at the old Arsenal Penitentiary in Washington before a crowd of invited spectators and armed soldiers. Photographs of the hangings, stark and terrible, became some of the most widely reproduced images of the era, and John Parker, the guard who had abandoned his post? He was charged with neglect of duty and tried on May 3, 1865. No transcripts of the proceeding were kept. The complaint was dismissed on June 2nd. Parker continued to serve on the police force and was even assigned to guard Mary Todd Lincoln as she prepared to move out of the White House. Mrs. Lincoln's dressmaker, Elizabeth Keckley, overheard the former First Lady confront Parker directly. You should have been there, she told him. You had no business being careless. I shall always believe you are guilty. Parker was eventually fired from the police force, not for his failure at Ford's Theater, but for being found asleep on duty months later. He died in 1890, reportedly having arranged to be buried in an unmarked grave, and Ward Hill Lehman, the man who had tried so desperately to protect Lincoln? He had not been in Washington on the night of April 14th. Lincoln had sent him on an errand to Richmond. When Lehman learned what had happened, he was devastated. As God is my judge, he said later, I believe if I had been in the city it would not have happened. The security failure at Ford's Theater is a story of institutional negligence with a single catastrophic outcome. But the deeper ripple of Lincoln's assassination, the one that would reshape America for generations, is not about how Lincoln died. It is about who replaced him. And this is where the ripple truly begins, because the assassination did not just kill a president, it changed who controlled the future. To understand the magnitude of this ripple, you have to understand where Lincoln stood on the question of reconstruction in the final days of his life. Lincoln was not a radical. He had spent much of the war navigating a careful path between those in his own party who wanted immediate and full equality for black Americans, and those, including many Northern Democrats, who wanted to reunify the nation with as little disruption to the old racial order as possible. But by April of 1865, Lincoln had moved decisively toward expanding the rights of freed black people. In the speech that so enraged Booth delivered just three days before the assassination, Lincoln had publicly endorsed extending the right to vote to educated black men and to those who had served in the Union Army. He had signed the Emancipation Proclamation. He had championed the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery. He had created the Freedmen's Bureau, a federal agency designed to help formerly enslaved people transition to freedom by providing food, housing, schools, and legal assistance. Lincoln's plans for Reconstruction were evolving rapidly in the final months of his life, and while historians debate exactly how far he would have gone, the trajectory was unmistakable. He was moving toward a vision of reconstruction, which That would include meaningful protections for black Americans, that would use federal power to ensure the former slaves were not simply returned to a condition that differed from slavery in name only. Andrew Johnson had no such vision. And the tragedy of his presidency begins, in a sense, with a political calculation made by Lincoln himself. Johnson was a war Democrat from Tennessee, a Southern Unionist who had remained loyal to the Union during the secession crisis, and had been placed on the Republican ticket in 1864 as a unity gesture designed to broaden the party's appeal in the border states. Lincoln's original vice president, Hannibal Hamlin of Maine, was a committed abolitionist. But Lincoln, fearing defeat in the 1864 election, dropped Hamlin and chose Johnson instead, prioritizing electoral strategy over ideological alignment. It was, many historians have argued, the worst personnel decision Lincoln ever made. Johnson was the only sitting Southern senator who had refused to join the Confederacy, and Lincoln valued his symbolic importance as a demonstration that unionism still existed in the South. But Johnson's unionism was not rooted in any commitment to racial equality. It was rooted in class resentment. Johnson despised the planter aristocracy of the South, not because they owned slaves, but because they were wealthy and powerful and looked down on men like him, a self-taught tailor from the hills of eastern Tennessee, who had never owned more than a handful of enslaved people himself. He once declared, with revealing candor, that he was fighting the traitorous aristocrats, their masters, not fighting on behalf of black freedom. He fought the Confederacy because it was led by the Southern elite, not because it perpetuated slavery. When Johnson assumed the presidency on April 15th, he immediately set about implementing a vision of reconstruction that was designed to restore the old social order of the South, minus secession, but with the racial hierarchy largely intact. Under Johnson's plan, former Confederate states were readmitted to the Union with minimal conditions. Former Confederate officials were pardoned wholesale. Land that had been confiscated by the Union Army and distributed to formerly enslaved people through the Freedmen's Bureau was taken back and returned to its pre-war owners. The newly reconstituted Southern state governments, led in many cases by the same men who had led them into rebellion, immediately began passing a series of laws known as the Black Codes. The Black Codes were, in effect, slavery by another name. They varied from state to state, but their purpose was consistent. To restrict the freedom of movement, employment, and civil rights of black Americans to such a degree that they remained a captive labor force, bound to the land and to the will of their former masters. Some codes required black workers to sign annual labor contracts and imposed criminal penalties for leaving a job before the contract expired. Others imposed vagrancy laws that made it a crime for a black person to be unemployed, with the punishment being forced labor. Some prohibited black people from owning property, from testifying against white people in court, from assembling in groups, or from carrying weapons. The codes were a systematic attempt to restore, through law, the condition of servitude that the Thirteenth Amendment had theoretically abolished. Johnson not only allowed the black codes to stand, he actively obstructed every legislative effort to counteract them. In 1866, Congress passed two landmark bills, an extension of the Freedmen's Bureau, which would have continued the federal government's role in protecting and supporting formerly enslaved people, and the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which for the first time defined all persons born in the United States as citizens entitled to equality before the law. Johnson vetoed both bills. His veto message for the Freedmen's Bureau Extension described it as paternalistic race legislation that would encourage laziness among black people. His veto of the Civil Rights Act argued that defining citizenship at the federal level violated states' rights. Congress overrode the Civil Rights Act veto, making it the first major law in American history passed over a presidential veto. But the damage was done. Johnson's vetoes had made clear that the executive branch of the United States government, under his leadership, would do nothing to protect black Americans from the systematic resubjugation that was taking place across the South. The Radical Republicans in Congress fought back, eventually passing the Reconstruction Acts over Johnson's vetoes, placing the South under temporary military rule and extending the vote to black men. They passed the Fourteenth Amendment, guaranteeing equal protection under the law, and the 15th Amendment, prohibiting the denial of voting rights based on race. Johnson opposed all of it. He was impeached by the House of Representatives in 1868, escaping removal from office by a single vote in the Senate. But Johnson's obstruction had achieved its essential purpose. By delaying Reconstruction, by restoring land and power to former Confederates, by allowing the Black Codes to take root, and by vetoing every piece of legislation designed to protect black Americans, he had created the conditions for the eventual abandonment of Reconstruction altogether. When Federal troops were withdrawn from the South as part of the compromise of 1877, the brief experiment in interracial democracy that Reconstruction had attempted collapsed entirely. In its place came the era of Jim Crow, poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, convict leasing, sharecropping, and the systematic exclusion of black Americans from political, economic, and social life in the former Confederacy. The Ku Klux Klan, founded in 1865, the same year Lincoln died, enforced this new order through terror, lynching, and intimidation. It would take nearly 100 years until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 for the federal government to again assert, with the full force of law, the principles that Congress had tried to establish during Reconstruction. Think about that. One hundred years. An entire century between the first attempt and the second. That gap, that vast empty space between promise and fulfillment, is the measure of this ripple. Would Lincoln have prevented all of this? Could any one man have overcome the enormous forces of racism, economic self-interest, and political exhaustion that conspired against Reconstruction? Historians disagree. Some argue that even Lincoln, with his political genius and his moral authority as the savior of the Union, would have been overwhelmed by the magnitude of the challenge. Others contend that Lincoln's combination of strategic flexibility, personal credibility, and genuine commitment to black advancement would have produced a fundamentally different outcome than Johnson's open hostility. What is beyond dispute is that the man who replaced Lincoln actively worked to undermine the rights of freed black Americans, and that the consequences of his presidency shaped the next century of American race relations. The bullet that killed Lincoln did not merely end a life. It altered the trajectory of millions of lives that Lincoln would never know. The other great ripple of Lincoln's assassination traveled through an entirely different channel. And it is a story that would be almost comical if the consequences were not so deadly. The slow, agonizing, almost unbelievably delayed evolution of presidential security in the United States. On the very morning of April 14, 1865, hours before he was shot, Abraham Lincoln signed into law a piece of legislation authorizing the creation of the United States Secret Service. The irony is almost too heavy to bear. But the Secret Service, as Lincoln authorized it, had nothing to do with protecting the president. Its sole mission was to combat the epidemic of counterfeit currency that was plaguing the nation's financial system during and after the Civil War. At the time, it was estimated that between one-third and one half of all currency in circulation was counterfeit. The Secret Service was a Treasury Department operation, and its agents were financial investigators, not bodyguards. Lincoln's assassination did not change this. Despite the manifest catastrophic failure of the ad hoc, untrained, undisciplined system that had allowed a single unreliable police officer to serve as the only line of defense between the president and a determined assassin, Congress took no action to create a formal system of presidential protection. The prevailing attitude, deeply rooted in the American democratic tradition, was that the president should remain accessible to the people. The idea of surrounding the nation's elected leader with a permanent security apparatus struck many as monarchical, a betrayal of the Republican principles on which the country had been founded. If the president could not walk among the people, the argument went, then the president was not truly of the people. This attitude persisted even after a second presidential assassination. On July 2, 1881, just sixteen years after Lincoln's death, President James A. Garfield arrived at the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station in Washington to catch a train to Williams College in Massachusetts, where he was scheduled to deliver a commencement address. He was walking through the station's waiting room, accompanied by Secretary of State James G. Blaine, but without any security detail whatsoever, when a man named Charles Guiteau stepped up behind him and fired two shots from a British bulldog revolver. One bullet grazed Garfield's arm, the other lodged deep in his back behind his pancreas. Guiteau was a mentally unstable, self-aggrandizing lawyer and failed evangelist who believed that his erratic campaign speeches had been instrumental in Garfield's election and that he was therefore owed a diplomatic appointment, specifically the position of consul to Paris. When the appointment never materialized, Gateau became convinced that God had instructed him to kill the president. He later told authorities that he had stalked Garfield for weeks, once following the president to a Sunday church service, but declining to shoot because he did not want to disturb the first lady who was present. Garfield did not die immediately. He lingered for nearly eighty agonizing days, suffering through the sweltering Washington summer in the White House. His medical care was, by modern standards, catastrophic. Doctors probed his wound repeatedly with unsterilized fingers and instruments, almost certainly introducing infections that worsened his condition far beyond the damage caused by the bullet itself. Alexander Graham Bell was summoned to the White House to try to locate the bullet with a prototype electromagnetic metal detector. The device failed, possibly because doctors insisted on searching only the right side of Garfield's body, where they believed the bullet had traveled, and possibly because the detector was picking up the metal springs in the president's mattress rather than the bullet lodged in his flesh. Garfield died on September 19, 1881, emaciated and septic, likely killed as much by his doctors as by his assassin. Once again, Congress declined to establish formal presidential protection. Bills were introduced, they were debated, they failed. The idea that the president needed a permanent security detail continued to strike many legislators as un-American. Some argued that it would create a dangerous precedent, elevating the president above the citizens he served. Others worried about the cost. Still others simply could not imagine that what had happened to Lincoln and Garfield represented a pattern rather than an aberration. The country had been given two opportunities to learn from catastrophe, and it had declined both. Beginning in 1894, the Secret Service, still a Treasury Department agency focused on counterfeiting, began providing informal, part-time protection to President Grover Cleveland. This was not the result of any congressional mandate. It was an ad hoc arrangement, driven by concern about specific threats. When William McKinley took office in 1897, the informal protection continued, but it remained sporadic, underfunded, and woefully inadequate by any modern standard. McKinley himself had a characteristically relaxed attitude toward his own security. He liked to take unaccompanied walks through the White House grounds and through the streets of his hometown of Canton, Ohio. He was the first president to travel by automobile, which posed an entirely new category of security risk that no one had seriously considered. A Secret Service agent named George Foster was assigned to travel with McKinley and guard him when he was outside the White House, but the protection was thin and inconsistent. It was not until a third president was murdered that the country finally acted. On September 6, 1901, President William McKinley was attending the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. His secretary, George Cortellew, had been deeply anxious about the president's schedule, particularly a public reception at the exposition's Temple of Music, where McKinley would stand in a receiving line and shake hands with anyone who wished to greet him. Cortellew had repeatedly removed the event from the president's itinerary. McKinley had repeatedly put it back. The president genuinely enjoyed meeting the public and could not be persuaded that the practice was dangerous, even though two of his predecessors had been shot under broadly similar circumstances, Lincoln at a public entertainment and Garfield in a public building. The reception began at four o'clock in the afternoon. The Temple of Music was stifling. Hundreds of people stood in a long line waiting to shake the president's hand. Normally every person approaching the president was required to have empty hands, presenting themselves for visual inspection before coming within reach. But because the day was oppressively hot, the rule had been relaxed. People were allowed to carry handkerchiefs to wipe the sweat from their faces. This accommodation, made for comfort, created a perfect concealment for a weapon. A twenty eight-year-old anarchist named Leon Cholgosh stood in line with a short barreled revolver hidden beneath a white handkerchief wrapped around his right hand. When he reached the president, he extended his left hand as if to shake. McKinley reached for it, and Cholgosh fired twice through the handkerchief at point blank range. One bullet struck a button on McKinley's coat and was deflected. The other tore into his abdomen, passing through his stomach and lodging in the muscles of his back. McKinley was rushed to a makeshift hospital on the exposition grounds. Surgeons operated but could not locate the second bullet. The president initially appeared to recover, and for several days his doctors issued optimistic bulletins. Then gangrene set in along the path of the bullet, and McKinley's condition deteriorated rapidly. He died on September 14, 1901, eight days after being shot. His last words to his wife, Ida, were reportedly, It is God's way, his will be done. Leon Cholgosh was tried, convicted, and executed by electric chair just 45 days after the assassination. McKinley was the third sitting president assassinated in 36 years. Three presidents, three bullets, three moments of abject security failure, each one entirely preventable, stretching across nearly four decades. Lincoln had been guarded by a single delinquent police officer who left his post to drink at a saloon. Garfield had been walking through a public train station with no protection whatsoever. McKinley had been standing in an open receiving line where the basic security protocol of checking visitors' hands had been waived because of the weather. Secretary of State John Hay, who had served as Lincoln's personal secretary as a young man and was a close friend of the murdered Garfield, had now witnessed the aftermath of a third assassination. When he arrived at McKinley's bedside and was told that the president was expected to recover, Hay reportedly responded flatly that the president would die. He had seen this before, twice. After McKinley's death, Congress finally acted. In 1902, the Secret Service, still technically a division of the Treasury Department, was informally directed to provide full-time protection for the president. Theodore Roosevelt became the first president to receive round-the-clock Secret Service coverage. Initially, the entire presidential detail consisted of just two agents. In 1906, Congress passed legislation formally designating and funding the Secret Service as the agency responsible for presidential security, finally establishing 41 years after Lincoln's assassination the institutional framework that every subsequent president would rely upon. The evolution continued in painful increments, driven almost always by tragedy rather than foresight. After the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, nearly a century after Lincoln, the Secret Service underwent another massive expansion and professionalization. Today, the agency deploys thousands of agents, employs sophisticated threat assessment protocols, coordinates with intelligence agencies around the world, and constructs multilayered security perimeters around every presidential movement. The contrast between the modern Secret Service and John Parker's empty chair at Ford's Theater is the contrast between institutional learning and institutional failure, between a country that finally understood the cost of leaving its leaders unprotected and the country that for decades simply refused to believe that protection was necessary. But the deeper lesson of the security ripple is not just about the Secret Service. It is about the peculiar American resistance to learning from catastrophe until the catastrophe becomes unbearable. Lincoln was killed and nothing changed. Garfield was killed and nothing changed. Only after McKinley was killed, after three presidents had died by assassination within the living memory of a single generation, did the country build the institution it should have built after the first. The pattern is familiar. It recurs throughout American history, in gun policy, in public health, in infrastructure, in climate. The country knows what it needs to do. It waits until the cost of inaction becomes impossible to ignore. And then sometimes it acts. Sometimes. There is one more ripple of Lincoln's assassination that deserves attention, though it is less tangible than the collapse of Reconstruction or the creation of the Secret Service. It is the ripple of myth. In life, Abraham Lincoln was one of the most polarizing figures in American political history. He was hated throughout the South with an intensity that is difficult to overstate. He was distrusted by many in the North. He was criticized by abolitionists for moving too slowly on emancipation, and by conservatives for moving too fast. His prosecution of the war was questioned constantly. His suspension of habeas corpus, his imprisonment of political dissidents, his expansion of executive power were all sources of deep controversy. In the election of 1864, he received only 55% of the popular vote, despite running against a candidate, George McClellan, whom he had previously fired as commanding general of the Union Army. In death, all of that complexity vanished. Lincoln was assassinated on Good Friday. He died on the morning of Easter Saturday. Ministers across the North drew the obvious parallel in their sermons the next day. Lincoln became, almost instantaneously, a Christ figure, a man who had given his life to save the Union, a martyr who had died so that others might be free. The funeral that followed was an unprecedented spectacle of national mourning. On April 18th, mourners lined up seven deep for more than a mile to view Lincoln's body in the White House. A funeral train then carried his remains through seven states on a 1600 mile journey to his burial site in Springfield, Illinois. At every stop, tens of thousands of Americans gathered to pay their respects. The entire country, or at least the northern half of it, was convulsed with grief. The martyrdom transformed Lincoln from a controversial wartime president into the most revered figure in American political history, a status he holds to this day. His face was carved into Mount Rushmore. His memorial sits at the western end of the National Mall in Washington, a temple in all but name, with his seated figure gazing out across the The reflecting pool toward the Washington Monument and the Capitol. His words from the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural are carved into the walls of that memorial and memorized by school children. He is consistently ranked by historians as the greatest or second greatest president in American history. This deification had consequences. Lincoln's martyrdom made it easier for subsequent generations to invoke his name in support of causes he might or might not have endorsed. It allowed Americans to treat the problem of racial justice as something that had been solved by Lincoln's sacrifice, rather than as an ongoing struggle that his death had actually made immeasurably harder. The myth of Lincoln the Great Emancipator obscured the reality that emancipation was incomplete, that freedom without economic and political power was a hollow promise, and that the man who replaced Lincoln had actively worked to ensure that the promise remained hollow. The martyrdom also contributed to a dangerous pattern in American political life, the tendency to venerate leaders only after they are gone, to recognize the value of what has been lost only when it is too late to preserve it. Lincoln's contemporaries understood this. Edwin Stanton, standing at Lincoln's deathbed as the president drew his final breath, reportedly said, Now he belongs to the ages. The remark, if Stanton indeed said it, captured something essential about what Lincoln's death meant. In life, Lincoln belonged to the messy, contentious, imperfect present. In death, he belonged to history, to memory, to the stories Americans would tell themselves about who they were and who they wanted to be. And those stories, however inspiring, could not substitute for the work that Lincoln's death had left undone. John Wilkes Booth fired a single bullet from a derringer small enough to fit in his hand. The bullet entered the back of Abraham Lincoln's skull, passed through his brain, and lodged behind his left eye. The wound was mortal and immediate. Lincoln never spoke again, never opened his eyes, never knew what had happened to him. But the ripple of that bullet extended far beyond a single life. It derailed Reconstruction and delivered the presidency to a man who used it to systematically undermine the rights of four million newly freed black Americans, setting in motion a century of Jim Crow laws, racial terror, and institutionalized inequality that persisted until the civil rights movement of the 1960s. It exposed, with devastating clarity, the absence of any system for protecting the leader of the most powerful nation on earth, a failure so deep and so persistent that it took two additional presidential assassinations over the next thirty-six years before the country finally built the institution it needed, and it transformed Lincoln himself into a national saint, a figure of almost religious reverence whose martyrdom both inspired and obscured the unfinished work of the republic he had fought to preserve. These ripples are still traveling. The racial inequalities that trace their origins to the failure of Reconstruction remain embedded in American life. The Secret Service, born from a century of assassinations and institutional neglect, continues to evolve in response to new threats, and the mythology of Lincoln, the tension between the man as he was and the symbol he became, continues to shape how Americans understand their history, their values, and their unfinished obligations to one another. On the morning of April 14, 1865, Abraham Lincoln was the happiest he had been in years. The war was over. The Union was preserved. He had a vision for what came next, imperfect and evolving, but fundamentally oriented toward justice. He had begun, in those final days, to speak publicly about extending the rights of citizenship to black Americans, a position that would have been politically unthinkable even two years earlier. He was not a perfect man, and he was not an uncomplicated one. He had arrived at his convictions about race slowly, pragmatically, and sometimes reluctantly, but he had arrived at them, and the direction in which he was moving on the last day of his life was unmistakably toward a more just and inclusive republic. By the next morning he was dead, and the country he had saved would spend the next century and a half reckoning with what his death had cost. The man who replaced him did not share his vision, did not share his moral trajectory, and did not share his willingness to use the power of the federal government to protect the newly freed. The institutions that might have protected Lincoln from the bullet did not exist because the country had not believed they were necessary, and the man himself transformed by death into a figure of almost divine reverence became a symbol that Americans could invoke without having to do the hard, unglamorous, politically costly work that his life's final project demanded. Every crime examined on this podcast has sent ripples outward in ways no one could have predicted. But the assassination of Abraham Lincoln did not send a ripple. It sent an ocean, still moving, still shaping the shoreline of the country he preserved, still carrying both the promise and the betrayal of what he fought to build. Thank you for listening to A Crime's Ripple Effect. Until next time, keep watching for the ripples. This episode was researched and written using publicly available historical sources, including records from the National Archives, the National Park Service, the Library of Congress, the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, and published scholarship on the Lincoln assassination and reconstruction.