The Conspirator

On April 14, 1865, five days after the Civil War ends with the South's surrender to the North at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, lawyer and Union veteran Frederick Aiken, with his friends, William Thomas Hamilton and Nicholas Baker, and his girlfriend, Sarah Weston, celebrate. Later that night, after John Wilkes Booth enters Ford’s Theater, Southerner Lewis Powell (referred to as Lewis Payne in the film) seriously wounds Secretary of State William Seward in an unsuccessful assassination attempt. German immigrant and carriage repair business owner George Atzerodt is assigned to kill Vice President Andrew Johnson, but becomes afraid, gets drunk, and runs away. Meanwhile, Booth sneaks into the President’s box and shoots his target, President Abraham Lincoln in the back of the head as he watches the play, Our American Cousin. Booth stabs diplomat and military officer Henry Rathbone, who was a guest in Lincoln's box, and leaps onto the stage, shouting, "Sic Semper Tyrannis! The South is avenged!" before escaping into Maryland. A crowd, including Aiken, Hamilton, and Baker, watches in horror as the unconscious President is taken to a nearby boarding house, where he dies early the next morning.