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, that battles were still raging

under the command of leadership that hadn't yet received the news. The simple fact that brave

Confederates were still in the fight was the only fuel needed to turn the fire of patriotism

burning inside John Wilkes Booth into an all-consuming inferno. He was convinced that decisive action

wasn't just needed, it was demanded. Booth arrived home that night to the National Hotel where he resided.

Perhaps he saw his girlfriend Lucy Hale, who happened to be the daughter of Senator John Hale, a well-known abolitionist.

This was no accident as Booth was known to be a mercenary when it came to his dating life.

Romantic relationships were purely for status, reputation, and most crucially, as he became

more involved with the war effort, information.

Being involved with a woman like Lucy Hale, no doubt presented opportunities to gain information

...