A member of the prominent 19th-century Booth theatrical family from Maryland , [ 1 ] he was a noted actor who was also a Confederate sympathizer; denouncing President Lincoln, he lamented the then-recent abolition of slavery in the United States. Originally, Booth and his small group of conspirators had plotted to kidnap Lincoln to aid the Confederate cause. Johnston continued fighting. Booth shot President Lincoln once in the back of the head.
Lincoln's death the next morning completed Booth's piece of the plot. Seward, severely wounded, recovered, whereas Vice President Johnson was never attacked. Booth fled on horseback to Southern Maryland ; twelve days later, at a farm in rural Northern Virginia , he was tracked down sheltered in a barn.
Booth's companion David Herold surrendered, but Booth maintained a stand-off. After the authorities set the barn ablaze, Union soldier Boston Corbett fatally shot him in the neck. Paralyzed, he died a few hours later. Of the eight conspirators later convicted, four were soon hanged.
Booth's father built Tudor Hall on the Harford County property as the family's summer home in , while also maintaining a winter residence on Exeter Street in Baltimore. As a boy, Booth was athletic and popular, and he became skilled at horsemanship and fencing. Timothy's Hall, an Episcopal military academy in Catonsville, Maryland.
Timothy's wore military uniforms and were subject to a regimen of daily formation drills and strict discipline. While attending the Milton Boarding School, Booth met a Romani fortune-teller who read his palm and pronounced a grim destiny, telling him that he would have a grand but short life, doomed to die young and "meeting a bad end".
