Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth on Good Friday, April 14, 1865, while attending the play Our American Cousin at Ford's Theatre as the American Civil War was drawing to a close. John Wilkes Booth had been planning to remove Lincoln from the political arena for a while. He even planned a kidnapping on March 20, but Lincoln failed to arrive at the spot where Booth and his co-conspirators expected him to be. When Booth shot Lincoln, he managed to escape easily, because the crowd thought the assassination was only part of the play. Booth was tracked down by 10,000 federal troops, policemen, and detective, which makes it one of the largest manhunts in history.