April 15, 1865

Assassination of Abraham Lincoln

Lincoln dies and Andrew Johnson succeeds to the presidency

While Lincoln lay unconscious across the street from Ford's Theatre, his intended successor slept at a hotel where another conspirator had been assigned to kill him.

7:22 a.m., 15 April 1865

President Abraham Lincoln died at 7:22 on the morning of 15 April 1865 in a rear bedroom of the Petersen boarding house in Washington, D.C., without regaining consciousness after John Wilkes Booth shot him about nine hours earlier at Ford's Theatre. He was 56, and the first U.S. president to be assassinated.

He had been laid diagonally across the Petersen House bed, because it was too short for him.

A succession completed before the oath

Vice President Andrew Johnson became the seventeenth president at the moment of Lincoln's death; the cabinet sent him a signed letter acknowledging it. The oath came later — administered at about 11 a.m. by Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase at the Kirkwood House hotel, before cabinet members and senators.

The formal ceremony inaugurated Johnson's exercise of the office; it did not create the succession.

The rest of the plot, half-executed

Washington was simultaneously handling a coordinated attack. Lewis Powell had seriously wounded Secretary of State Seward, while George Atzerodt abandoned his assigned attack on Johnson at the very hotel where Johnson would take the oath.

Booth was still a fugitive on 15 April, and Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton directed the government response and the investigation from the Petersen House.

Sources

Researched 23 Aug 2026 6 sources 3 audit passes

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet, rewritten from that sheet, then audited against it by a different model. How the pipeline works →

What the sources leave uncertain

The date, time, location, age, and succession are well documented. Sources vary slightly on the shooting time—approximately 10:13 to 10:15 p.m.—but agree that Lincoln died at 7:22 a.m.
The famous wording attributed to Stanton immediately after Lincoln's death is disputed between 'Now he belongs to the ages' and 'Now he belongs to the angels'; it is therefore omitted as a verified quotation.