Assassin’s Escape
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The words roared over the heads of the hushed crowd at Ford’s Theatre. It was April 14, 1865, and Abraham Lincoln had just been shot. Envisioning himself a hero and a martyr for the Southern cause, actor John Wilkes Booth bellowed those words—Latin for “Thus always to tyrants”—after leaping onto the stage from the theater’s presidential box, where he had fatally wounded the beloved president with a .44-caliber Derringer pistol.
