John Wilkes Booth did not have a death wish, and he tried to escape into southern territory after assassinating Abraham Lincoln. But in the event escape proved impossible, he had no plans to face trial and execution. “I have too great a soul to die like a criminal,” he wrote in his diary not long before the assassination (via Smithsonian Magazine). When he was finally cornered amid the manhunt, he refused to surrender and tried to challenge his 29 pursuers to an honorable duel. When he was refused, and the Union soldiers moved to set his hideout on fire, Booth refused to shoot them or himself. He fled from the barn, took a bullet to the neck, and was dead within a few hours.
Booth’s co-conspirators faced less theatrical ends. All of them faced justice before the courts, and except for Confederate spy John Surratt, all were convicted at one time or another. Three of the conspirators would be pardoned by President Andrew Johnson in 1869, but four were executed by hanging in July 1865 at Washington D.C.’s Old Penitentiary. It was here that Booth was initially buried. In fact, he beat his comrades there. After his body was identified and autopsied, it was secretly buried on the penitentiary’s grounds before the hangings. Booth and his co-conspirators were left there for two years before being exhumed and reburied in a penitentiary warehouse.
