As the audience laughed at a comic line, Booth slipped into the presidential box and fired a single shot from a .44-caliber Derringer into the back of Lincoln's head. He leapt to the stage shouting 'Sic semper tyrannis!' and escaped into the night. Lincoln, unconscious, was carried across the street to a boarding house, where he died the next morning.
The war was, for all practical purposes, over. Robert E. Lee had surrendered at Appomattox five days earlier, and Washington was still giddy with celebration when Lincoln and his wife Mary decided to attend a play at Ford's Theatre. His bodyguard, John Parker, left his post outside the box during the performance, a lapse that has haunted historians ever since.
Booth, a well-known actor and Confederate sympathizer enraged by the South's defeat, had plotted for weeks to decapitate the Union government, planning simultaneous attacks on Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William Seward. Only his own attack succeeded fully. He broke his leg leaping from the box but still managed to escape on horseback, evading capture for twelve days before being cornered in a Virginia barn.
Lincoln never regained consciousness. He was moved to the Petersen House across the street because the theater box was too cramped, and he died there at 7:22 the next morning, surrounded by cabinet members and his son Robert. The assassination transformed him instantly from a divisive wartime leader into a martyr, reshaping the difficult politics of Reconstruction that followed.