The assassination of Abraham Lincoln, one of the last major events in the American Civil War, took place on Good Friday, April 14, 1865, when President Abraham Lincoln was shot while attending a performance of Our American Cousin at Ford's Theatre with his wife and two guests.

Some theorists support various pices of evidence that Lincoln was killed as part of a grand conspiracy of Confederates arose almost immediately after the assassination.

Another theory holds that Lincoln needed money to finance the Civil War.  Bankers in Europe led by the Rothschilds offered him loans at high interest rates. Rather than accept the loans, Lincoln found other means to fund the war effort, thus setting into motion the plot to kill Lincoln be means of a paid sympathetic assassin at an opportunity of easy access, that being at the hand of confederate actor John Wilkes Booth at Ford's Theater in Washigton, D.C.