John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theater in Washington D.C.

John Wilkes Booth (May 10, 1838 – April 26, 1865) the famous American stage actor who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre, in Washington, D.C., on April 14, 1865. Booth was a member of the prominent 19th century Booth theatrical family from Maryland and, by the 1860s, was a well-known actor. In the book, John Wilkes Booth – A Sister’s Memoir by Asia Booth, it was revealed that John Wilkes Booth’s father, Junius Brutus Booth, was Jewish. The passage reads: “Born in 1796 to a highly educated clan of Jewish lawyers and silversmiths on his father’s side” He was also a Confederate sympathizer, vehement in his denunciation of Lincoln, and strongly opposed the abolition of slavery in the United States.

John Wilkes Booth's paternal great-great-great-grandfather was Ricardo Botha, who born in 1675 in Portugal; he was a Sephardic Jew who fled Portugal and settled in England, changing his name from Botha to Booth. His grandson, John Booth, Jr., (1723-1787), was a silversmith established in London, England. He married Elizabeth Wilkes (1720-1801); John's sons John and Philip were both distillers of gin; wile his son Richard (John Wilkes Booth's grandfather) was an attorney. Richard's son, Junius Brutus Booth (1796-1852), was a well-known Shakespearean actor in England and America. In his 1865 biography entitled The life, crime, and capture of John Wilkes Booth, George Alfred Townsend writes of Junius Brutus Booth:

"The elder Booth in every land was a sojourner, as all his fathers were of Hebrew descent, and by a line of actors, he united in himself that.strong Jewish physiognomy which, in its nobler phases, makes all that is dark and beautiful, and the combined vagrancy of all men of genius and all men of the stage. Fitful, powerful,- passionate, his life was a succession of vices and triumphs."

John Wilkes Booth and a group of co-conspirators originally plotted to kidnap Lincoln, but later planned to kill him, Vice President Andrew Johnson, and Secretary of State William H. Seward in a bid to help the Confederacy's cause. Although Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia had surrendered four days earlier, Booth believed the war was not yet over because Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston's army was still fighting the Union Army. Of the conspirators, only Booth was completely successful in carrying out his respective part of the plot. After Booth shot him once in the back of the head, Lincoln died the next morning. Seward was severely wounded but recovered. Vice-President Johnson was never attacked at all.

Following the assassination, Booth fled on horseback to southern Maryland, eventually making his way to a farm in rural northern Virginia 12 days later, where he was tracked down. Booth's companion gave himself up, but Booth refused and was shot by a Union soldier after the barn in which he was hiding was set ablaze. Eight other conspirators or suspects were tried and convicted, and four were hanged shortly thereafter.

According to some Booth researchers, the assassination of Lincoln was ordered by North America's first Jewish cabinet member, Judah Benjamin, a Rothschild agent, in reaction to Lincoln's passage of the National Banking Act which effectively crippled the European Rothschilds family's domination over American banking interests. The Rothschilds would not regain control of American banking completely until 1913 with the Federal Reserve Act. Jacob Schiff, a Rothschild agent who was instrumental in the Federal Reserve Act, later financed the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.