jubilant with the exhilterating news that General Grant had convinced Robert E. Lee to surrender all of the Confederate Armies, President Abraham Lincoln departed Washington City for Appomatox Court House where he would deliver a keynote speech that recognised the significance of this remarkable gesture of peace and national reconciliation.

Surrounded by the Army of the Potomac at Lynchberg, Lee had chosen to surrender Please click the icon to follow us on Facebook.only the Army of North Virginia (over which he had direct command). The change of mind to surrender all of the Confederate Armies (which were nominally under his command) was prompted by the successful meeting at the McLean House.

In his personal memoirs, Grant would note that

"What General Lee's feelings were I do not know.
We soon fell into a conversation about old army times. He remarked that he remembered me very well in the old army; and I told him that as a matter of course I remembered him perfectly, but from the difference in our rank and years (there being about sixteen years' difference in our ages), I had thought it very likely that I had not attracted his attention sufficiently to be remembered by him after such a long interval.
Our conversation grew so pleasant that I almost forgot the object of our meeting".

The feelings of the Maryland-born racist John Wilkes Booth could safely be described as less ambivalent and not pleasant at all. Only the year before, he had concocted a plot to kidnap the President and ransom him in exchange for Confederate Prisoners of war.

Now he set upon a new assignment, he would follow Lincoln to Virginia, although he had not yet decided whether to shoot the President, or the traitor he was now refering to as "Our American Cousin", Robert E. Lee. Or perhaps both.

And so he decided to take along with him George A. Atzerodt, David Herold, and the former Confederate Soldier Lewis Paine. Just in case he needed to pull together a multiple assassination cross-fire team, because you could never be too sure of success as a Lone Gunman.