It's extraordinary what. People say they saw at Ford's Theater that night. John McSpoohs was a megastorm.

The American political climate has always been rife with division, but even juxtaposed against

today's polarized environment, it has never been nearly as divided as it was during the Civil War.

I'm Alec Baldwin. This is a story that shows how the lines are so often blurred

between hero and villain,

immortality and infamy, justice and vengeance,

and how in that respect, nothing has changed today.

Listen to The Ides of April,

starting July 23rd, wherever you get your podcasts.

EEO.

Abraham Lincoln gave his last public address on April 11, 1865.

It was the first oratorical shot across the bow.

So he gives a serious, if somewhat dry speech on Reconstruction.

Lincoln historian Harold Holzer. And in the crowd is John Wilkes Booth. So Lincoln talks for the first time any American president has spoken publicly about extending the right to vote to African Americans.

Nobody had ever suggested it before.

Lincoln was in his customary, slow but sure way introducing an expansion of human rights

that had not been foreseen by the founders

or by anybody else recently. Booth knows it as a revolutionary act. Booth knows that it's a

radical statement because two sources say that he turned to his co-conspirator and said that

means Negro equality, and he doesn't use the word Negro.

Just two days earlier, Robert E. Lee had surrendered the Confederacy to Ulysses S. Grant ending the Civil War.

The surrender was swift. It happened so quickly, in fact,

...