On April 14, 1865, hundreds of Americans in Washington, D.C., roared with laughter as the comedy “Our American Cousin” was performed in Ford’s Theatre. In the play, an American hayseed appears in England to claim an inheritance from his aristocratic family to hilarious results. Watching from the second-story Presidential Box was Abraham Lincoln: America’s own self-made man, who had been dismissed by critics as a rube from America’s frontier, as out of place in elite D.C. as the cousin from America in the play was in patrician England.

            But President Lincoln, the country lawyer from Illinois, had steered the nation through its greatest crisis since independence: the Civil War. The losses of the war were horrendous: 620,000 men had died on the battlefield and countless thousands suffered from physical and mental wounds that mirrored those of the nation as a whole, for it was not just the soldiers who had suffered. Much of the American South lay in ruins, its largest cities burned to the ground, its plantations ravaged and its economy halted. Thousands faced near starvation in the fertile American South. In the North, New York City saw some of the worst riots in history in 1863 when thousands protested Lincoln’s conscription of men into the Union Army and hundreds were killed. The entire nation was worn out.

            With the war winding down and victory inevitable for the North, even though several small Confederate Armies still remained in the field, Lincoln allowed himself to laugh for the first time in a long time that night. The war had been especially hard on him. Often sleepless at night, he would take solitary walks on Pennsylvania Avenue, the street on which the White House lies, and would visit wounded soldiers at the makeshift hospitals lining the capital. His precious son, Willie, had died during the war of a childhood illness forcing a grieving Lincoln to feel the sting of sending other people’s sons to die in battle that much more acutely.

            Amid the laughter in the theater a shot rang out, and the president slumped in his chair. A handsome actor and Confederate sympathizer, John Wilkes Booth, had snuck into the presidential suite and, for the first time in American history, assassinated the president of the United States with a shot to the back of the head. Booth jumped over the balcony and onto the stage, shouted “Sic Semper Tyrannis” or “Thus always to tyrants” in Latin before limping off on a wounded leg. Booth would be tracked down and killed 12 days later in Virginia when he resisted arrest.

            President Lincoln was not the only official targeted that night. Vice President Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, chosen as Lincoln’s running mate in 1864 because he had been the only U.S. senator from a seceded state that had remained loyal to the Union, was spared when the assassin assigned to kill him lost his nerve. Secretary of State William Seward was stabbed in his own home in D.C. but survived. Lt. Gen.Ulysses S. Grant, the first to carry that title since George Washington, and his wife, Julia, were followed in their carriage as they left the capital that evening. Earlier that day, Grant had turned down President Lincoln’s invitation to join him at the theater that night. If Grant, who had done so much to win the war for the North, attended, he would likely have shared President Lincoln’s fate.

            Lincoln died the following day, sending a shocked nation into mourning. Over 25 million Americans paid their respects to the president as his casket traveled by rail through 180 cities in seven states on its way back to his hometown of Springfield, Illinois. Despite his assassination at the hands of a man with Southern ties, the American South likely lost an ally as well. For despite all the horrors of the war, Lincoln envisioned welcoming back the 13 states of the Confederacy without harsh punishments. His successors in the White House proved less able to balance the various political factions that Lincoln had so skillfully kept together through the war.

            The legacy of Lincoln is immense. He not only held the Union together through four long years of war, but he also helped to finally rid America of the stain of slavery. While many at the time and since argued that Lincoln did not move fast enough to end what had started the war in the first place, he nevertheless successfully shepherded the 13^th Amendment (the abolition of slavery) through Congress in January of 1865.

            This humble man who led America through its darkest days was born poor in a log cabin and attended only a few years of formal schooling. He worked as a farmer, storekeeper, flat boatman, surveyor and postmaster before teaching himself law and becoming a successful attorney. He even argued a case before the U.S. Supreme Court. So, the next time you look at a $5 bill, which bears the face of Abraham Lincoln, remember that a poor, self-taught man rose to become the president of the United States and then held the country together through great personal and national tragedy. Lincoln recognized that we all have greatness inside of us. He steered a nation through a brutal civil war to keep the Union together because he believed that in America people are freer to pursue their inner greatness than almost anywhere else on earth.

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