Who were the conspirators who planned Lincolns assassination?
Late in 1864 popular actor John Wilkes Booth, working out of Mrs Mary Surratt’s Washington, D.C. boarding house, recruited conspirators John H. Surratt (Mrs. Surratt’s son), Lewis T. Paine (born Powell), Samuel Arnold, Michael O’Laughlin, David Herold, and George Atzerodt for a plot to kidnap President Abraham Lincoln and exchange him for Confederate prisoners of war. The scheme failed March 1865. About the time of the surrender of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, Booth committed himself to the assassination of top Union officials and secured help from his associates in the kidnapping plot.