Tuesday will be the 150th anniversary of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

But more than the president's life was ended by the bullet fired in Ford's Theatre that Good Friday in 1865. Lincoln's plans for post-war America died with him.

And a nation that had just ended a bloody civil war five days earlier was deeply shaken by its first presidential assassination.

The conspiracy hatched by actor John Wilkes Booth rippled outward, touching many lives including that of one future Butler resident. Booth, himself, had a connection with Western Pennsylvania.

There had been a previous attempt on the president's life, said Aaron Cowan, associate professor of history at Slippery Rock University.

Cowan said in August 1864 Lincoln was riding, alone, outside the capital when a shot was fired, causing his horse to bolt and knocking his stovepipe hat from his head.

Cowan said Lincoln dismissed this incident as a “foolish hunting accident.”

Bill May, local historian and founder of the Butler County Civil War Roundtable, said Lincoln was unprotected in a way that would be inconceivable today.

“Assassination was not considered in the American character. It was something that people thought would never happen,” said May. “Lincoln didn't have bodyguards. Anyone could walk into the White House to see Lincoln. The president would go back and forth by himself to his summer house.”

“There wasn't any Secret Service,” said Deb Kruger, history instructor at Butler County Community College. “He had only one guard with him that night. He kept a box filled with (mailed) death threats. He didn't take them seriously.”

What few people realize today is that Lincoln wasn't the only target that night in 1865.

“Booth was working with other people not only to kill Lincoln but the vice president and the secretary of state as well,” Cowan said. “The idea was to destroy the whole continuity of the government and push it into chaos in an attempt to keep the war going.”

“There were lots of Confederates ready to fight on, to run to the hills and regroup,” Cowan said. “It seems foolish now, but it seemed possible from Booth's perspective.”

May said Booth's three co-conspirators were Lewis Powell and David Herold, who were assigned to kill Secretary of State William Seward, and George Atzerodt who was tasked to kill Vice President Andrew Johnson.

Powell only managed to wound Seward, whose life was saved by the brace he was wearing for a broken jaw, May said Atzerodt, Johnson's would-be assassin, lost his nerve, got blind drunk instead and fled.

Still, Booth was successful in his mission, entering Lincoln's unguarded theater box, shooting him in the back of the head, leaping onto the stage below and making his escape on horseback.

No need for conspiracy theories, Kruger said, “There was absolutely a conspiracy. Booth had been planning this for a while.

“He considered himself a child of the South. He wanted to take out Lincoln. He was just looking for the opportunity to do so,” she said.

“Booth was very well known. He came from a prominent acting family. He was young, 26, and very handsome and people would have known that name.

“People thought it was part of the play when he jumped onto the stage,” Kruger said.

Booth's actions rocked the country, said May, because it would be as if “Tom Cruise assassinated the president” today.

But Booth the actor badly misjudged his audience. As he fled south on horseback with his accomplice, Herold, he expected applause that was not forthcoming.

“Booth thought he would be a hero when he got to Virginia. He was so disappointed. Even Robert E. Lee thought what Booth had done was reprehensible,” May said.

As Booth dodged Union patrols in Maryland and Virginia, the nation mourned its president.

The national outpouring of grief “was because of Lincoln's stature and his death coming at the end of the Civil War,” Cowan said. “If it had been Millard Fillmore, with all due respect to Millard Fillmore, it wouldn't have been that significant in history.

“For people who saw the war as an end to slavery, it led to his martyrdom. That it happened on Good Friday made the parallel even at that time, canonizing Lincoln as almost a Christ-like figure sacrificed for a greater cause,” Cowan said.

After the president's body had lain in state, his coffin was loaded onto a special train on April 21.

Lincoln's funeral train was observed and honored by crowds in Washington, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, where it arrived May 3.

Kruger said, “He was being taken back to his hometown of Springfield, giving the people of America a chance to mourn their president. There was no TV, no radio. The funeral train gave the nation a chance to mourn.”

“In fact, a lot of presidential funeral precedents were set,” Kruger said. “Jackie Kennedy copied a lot of what happened in the Lincoln funeral, such as the lying in state.”

Booth, denied his hero's welcome, was still on the run.

May said history may have been much different if a primitive method of fracking had worked the previous year.

May said Booth spent time in Western Pennsylvania, Franklin specifically, where he was part owner of an oil company, Ornate Oil Co.

“He had come to Franklin full time in May 1864,” said May. “It was tough being an actor, traveling by train and stage coach. Booth had gotten tired of that.”

“His oil well produced about 25 gallons of oil a day, not enough to make money. So Booth did what they called 'shoot the well,'” May said.

“You explode gunpowder in the well to frack the rock to release the oil,” he said. “In this case the explosion caused no oil to come and that was the end of the Ornate Oil Co.”

But there is even a closer tie between the assassin and Butler.

That link is Lettie Hall, the former slave of Dr. Samuel Mudd, and her sister, Louisa Christie.

May said Mudd had had nine slaves before the war. After the war. Lettie and Louisa were house servants for Mudd. Lettie was 15 the day of Lincoln's murder.

May said after Booth shot Lincoln, he arrived at Mudd's southern Maryland home at 4 a.m. with Herold.

Booth had broken his leg in his leap from the presidential box to the Ford's Theatre stage.

“Booth told Mudd the horse had gotten spooked and fallen on his leg. breaking it two inches above the ankle,” May said.

May said, “Booth had met Mudd before, three other times when Booth was working on a plan to kidnap Lincoln and exchange him for Confederate prisoners.”

May said when Gen. U.S. Grant ended prisoner exchanges, Booth changed the kidnapping plot into a planned assassination.

“He had plotted out an escape route to take Lincoln. Southern Maryland was very pro-Confederate,” May said. Booth was using the alibi that he was looking to buy land.

Booth met Mudd in 1864.

So when Booth arrived at the Mudd house, he was not unknown.

May said, “Mudd was involved in the kidnapping plot, but that morning he didn't know Lincoln had been assassinated.”

“He sits in the parlor. Mudd cuts his boot off and puts a splint on his leg and then Booth goes to an upstairs bedroom,” said May.

“Mudd wakens the sisters and tells them 'We have some special visitors upstairs. I want you to go and kill a chicken and fix them breakfast.'”

Lettie goes outside, kills a chicken and prepares a breakfast of chicken and biscuits for Booth and Herold.

“Lettie takes Booth and Davey Herold their meal, and Booth gives Lettie a quarter for herself and a quarter for Louisa. It's the first money either has had in her life,” May said.

“Mudd took and kept the quarters and later that afternoon Booth and Herold leave,” he said.

Later, Lettie remembers Union troops coming looking for Booth.

“She leaves in 1870 and moves to Alexandria, Va., where she has two children,” May said. “She met the Rev. David Brown Dade, who was one of the founders of Shiloh Baptist Church on Snyder Avenue, and marries him in 1922.”

She moved to Butler after the marriage and lived here for 14 years until her death.

She is buried in Rose Hill Cemetery.

On April 26, 1865, Booth and Herold were found hiding in the Garrett farm's tobacco barn in northern Virginia. Surrounded by Union soldiers, Herold surrendered, but Booth refused and was shot through a hole in the barn's siding. Booth, now paralyzed from the neck down, died three hours later on the porch of the farmhouse.

Also a victim of Booth's bullet were whatever plans Lincoln had for the post-war South.

Cowan said, “No one can say what Lincoln's policies would have been like. One thing you can say is Lincoln would have worked with his own party better than (successor Andrew) Johnson did.”

“You had a faction in the Republican Congress called the Radical Republicans. Thaddeus Stevens, a Pennsylvania congressman, he was one of the leaders of that faction.

“They supported full citizenship for African-Americans and even voting rights for African-Americans,” Cowan said.

“While Lincoln was more interested in trying to restore the Union and more willing to compromise with the South than the Radical Republicans, he would have been able to navigate that difference of opinion better than Johnson,” he said.

“Johnson was a southern Democrat who didn't secede with his state. That was unusual,” Cowan said.

“He was added to the ticket for the second term as part of a national unity party,” he said. “He was from the eastern part of Tennessee, a fairly strong pro-Union region of the Confederacy.”

May said, “Andrew Johnson ends up following a lot of what Lincoln would have done. (But) he was harder on the South than Lincoln would have been.”

Kruger said, “Lincoln really wanted to bring the country together again.”

“Johnson was not the man to do it,” she said. “He hated the rich Southerners. He made a mess of Reconstruction when it first started, and it wasn't the way Lincoln envisioned it.”

By The Associated PressOn the night Abraham Lincoln was shot, April 14, 1865, Associated Press correspondent Lawrence Gobright scrambled to report from the White House, the streets of the stricken capital, and even from the blood-stained box at Ford's Theatre, where, in his memoir he reports he was handed the assassin's gun and turned it over to authorities. Here is an edited version of his original AP dispatch:WASHINGTON, APRIL 14 — President Lincoln and wife visited Ford's Theatre this evening for the purpose of witnessing the performance of 'The American Cousin.' It was announced in the papers that Gen. Grant would also be present, but that gentleman took the late train of cars for New Jersey.The theatre was densely crowded, and everybody seemed delighted with the scene before them. During the third act and while there was a temporary pause for one of the actors to enter, a sharp report of a pistol was heard, which merely attracted attention, but suggested nothing serious until a man rushed to the front of the President's box, waving a long dagger in his right hand, exclaiming, 'Sic semper tyrannis,' and immediately leaped from the box, which was in the second tier, to the stage beneath, and ran across to the opposite side, made his escape amid the bewilderment of the audience from the rear of the theatre, and mounted a horse and fled.The groans of Mrs. Lincoln first disclosed the fact that the President had been shot, when all present rose to their feet rushing towards the stage, many exclaiming, 'Hang him, hang him!' The excitement was of the wildest possible description...There was a rush towards the President's box, when cries were heard — 'Stand back and give him air!' 'Has anyone stimulants?' On a hasty examination it was found that the President had been shot through the head above and back of the temporal bone, and that some of his brain was oozing out. He was removed to a private house opposite the theatre, and the Surgeon General of the Army and other surgeons were sent for to attend to his condition.On an examination of the private box, blood was discovered on the back of the cushioned rocking chair on which the President had been sitting; also on the partition and on the floor. A common single-barrelled pocket pistol was found on the carpet.A military guard was placed in front of the private residence to which the President had been conveyed. An immense crowd was in front of it, all deeply anxious to learn the condition of the President.It had been previously announced that the wound was mortal, but all hoped otherwise. ...At midnight the Cabinet, with Messrs. Sumner, Colfax and Farnsworth, Judge Curtis, Governor Oglesby, Gen. Meigs, Col. Hay, and a few personal friends, with Surgeon General Barnes and his immediate assistants, were around his bedside.The President was in a state of syncope, totally insensible and breathing slowly. The blood oozed from the wound at the back of his head. The surgeons exhausted every effort of medical skill, but all hope was gone.The parting of his family with the dying President is too sad for description.The President and Mrs. Lincoln did not start for the theatre until 15 minutes after 8 o'clock. Speaker Colfax was at the White House at the time, and the President stated to him that he was going, although Mrs. Lincoln had not been well, because the papers had announced that he and General Grant were to be present, and as Gen. Grant had gone North he did not wish the audience to be disappointed. He went with apparent reluctance, and urged Mr. Colfax to go with him, but that gentleman had made other arrangements ...In this portion of the report is a lengthy description of the simultaneous assassination attempt on Secretary of State William Seward that left him wounded. Followed by:Secretaries Stanton and Welles and other prominent officers of the government called at Secretary Seward's house to inquire into his condition, and there heard of the assassination of the President.They then proceeded to the house where the President was lying, exhibiting, of course, intense anxiety and solicitude.An immense crowd was gathered in front of the President's house (the White House), and a strong guard was also stationed there, many persons supposing that he would be brought to his home.The entire city tonight presents a scene of wild excitement, accompanied by violent expressions of the profoundest sorrow. Many shed tears.The military authorities despatched mounted patrols in every direction, in order, if possible, to arrest the assassins. The whole metropolitan police are likewise vigilant for the same purpose. ...Vice President Johnson is in the city headquarters, and guarded by troops.Lincoln's death at 7:22 a.m. on April 15 was reported by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton.