John Wilkes Booth

Divided loyalties and ironies tore at Marylanders' hearts throughout the Civil War, with enslaved African Americans and free United States Colored Troops, spies and smugglers, civilians imprisoned without trial to protect freedom, and neighbors and families at odds in Maryland and on faraway battlefields. From the Eastern Shore to the suburbs of Washington, D.C., Maryland endured strains of civil war in many ways difficult to imagine today, and those strains continued even after Confederate General Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox. After shooting President Abraham Lincoln on April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth used the help of Southern Maryland's Confederate underground during his flight from Washington, D.C. before his eventual capture south of the Potomac River.

Maryland · United States