150 years ago this morning: Abraham Lincoln died of his wounds

John Wilkes Booth shot the President in the head on the night of 14 April 1865 at Ford's Theater in Washington, DC.

Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln were at the theater to see the English play, "Our American Cousin", which centers around an English family visited by a long-lost American cousin. Culture clash and hilarity ensue!

John Wilkes Booth was an actor and knew when, in the course of the production, the biggest laugh would come from the audience. He planned to use that commotion to mask his derringer's report.

I commemorate the death of a great President, Abraham Lincoln, 16th President of these United States of America, and cannot help but wonder how the South's fortunes might have been different had he lived out his second term as President.

Surely the racism would still have been there, it remains today; the KKK would have risen just as it did, founded by former Confederate officers. Jim Crow and lynchings still would have occurred during the early 20th century.

But I like to think that things would have been a bit better had Lincoln survived. Andrew Johnson, the drunken buffoon, made things worse in the short term.