The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln: How One Bullet Changed America

Send us Fan MailOn the morning of April 14, 1865, Abraham Lincoln was the happiest he'd been in years. The war was over. He had a vision for what came next. By the next morning, he was dead. In this episode of A Crime's Ripple Effect, we trace the three great ripples of his assassination: the political ripple that placed Reconstruction in the hands of a man who actively worked to dismantle it, delaying racial justice for a century. The security ripple that took three presidential assassinations over thirty-six years before America finally built the institution we now call the Secret Service. And the myth — how Lincoln's death transformed a divisive wartime president into a symbol larger than the man himself, creating a martyrdom that both inspired the country and obscured the unfinished work his assassination left behind.