On this day in 1865, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth
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Punished Miku
Banned
Most of the conspiracies back then involved race, religion, or secret societies. There is a surprising amount of conspiratorial thought in the US since its founding.
Mistake
Member
Edwin Booth rescued Lincoln's son from a train before the assassination happened, so it had its odd coincidences
Maiden Voyage
Gold™ Member
RIP king
Maiden Voyage
Gold™ Member
His magnum opus for those unfamiliar with his work:
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Dr.D00p
Member
If social media had existed in 1865, humanity would never have made it 1900.
TheInfamousKira
Reseterror Resettler
InfiniteCombo
Banned
The loss of one of the greatest leaders in history was a monumental event in American history with deep repercussions. Historians can only speculate, but one of the thoughts is that Reconstruction would not have been such a catastrophy under Lincoln's watch, since he had a relatively reconciliatory attitude towards the South.
This hit the country hard. It hit his family hard. His wife went batshit insane and had to be committed to a mental institution.
This hit the country hard. It hit his family hard. His wife went batshit insane and had to be committed to a mental institution.
Trogdor1123
Member
No, he was too busy slaying vampires.
Fact check true
Fact check true
Captain Toad
Banned
I remember that. That was craaaaazy.
InfiniteCombo
Banned
Is that movie worth watching at all?
Trogdor1123
Member
Dude, he punches through trees in it. Yes, it is worth watching!
Spaceman292
Banned
This thread turned out to be much better than I was expecting
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Wheeljack539
Member
Out of curiosity; have you ever pondered for shits n' giggles on a 'what if' if the latter were actually a real thing?
It really is one of the weird coincidences.
I also remember hearing that Lincoln knew that he wasn't going to live out his second term and I think something about nightmares his wife was having.
What always amuses me when I think about this is how JWB was flabbergasted that people didn't react the way he thought they would. He seriously thought he would've been lauded and enshrined for "rescuing" the Republic. He even had a rebuttal being written to what he had read in the papers when he was found and killed.
It would have been a glorious shit post if forums existed back then.
I believe wholeheartedly that we wouldn't have had such a massive divide with the South had Lincoln lived. Yes, there would have been differences but not to the level that has persisted since the Civil War.
It makes me want a sequel with Teddy Roosevelt. It'd be fucking lit.
NecrosaroIII
Banned
Who assassinated who?
AJUMP23
Parody of actual AJUMP23
His greatest speech.
DeepEnigma
Gold Member
It's widely believed — and repeated all over the internet — that the phrase originates in one of two stories from ancient Rome, both of them connected with a freedom-lover named Brutus:
- In the first, in 509 BCE, Brutus overthrows a tyrannical king named Tarquin and founds the Roman Republic.
- In the second, in 44 BCE, Brutus assassinates Julius Caesar, the Roman statesman and general who had been behaving tyrannically, in Pompey's Theater.
...The assassination of Tiberius Gracchus is one of the most famous stories in ancient Rome. Ancient historians saw it as a pivotal factor in Rome's slide from republic to autocracy — a slide never to be reversed. As the Encyclopedia Britannica puts it, "the tribunate of Tiberius Gracchus marked the beginning of the 'Roman revolution.'"
Gracchus' grandfather, the great general and statesman Scipio Aemilianus, was away in Spain at the time. When word of the assassination reached him, according to Plutarch (21.4), he reacted by quoting a line from the start of Homer's Odyssey (1.47):
... in the Odyssey, the speaker is the goddess Athena, and she's alluding to a man named Aegisthus.
As students of Greek mythology know, Aegisthus was the original "Jody" of military legend. When King Agamemnon went off to fight the Trojan War, Aegisthus moved in and seduced his wife.
When Agamemnon returned ten years later, Aegisthus murdered him and became a "tyrant" in the technical Greek sense of one who has become king through extralegal means. (This is the idea behind the title of Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus.)
Years later, when Agamemnon's son Orestes grew up, he returned and murdered Aegisthus. In Athena's view, that serves him right.
...when George Wythe (or Mason) devised the motto sic semper tyrannis, he was not thinking of either Brutus, but of this line of the Odyssey, as quoted by Scipio Aemilianus on that occasion and as reported by Plutarch.
Plutarch's Lives were widely read in colonial America. Mason owned a copy, and Wythe — the more likely author — himself was a Classicist. (Interestingly, this website says Wythe, just like Tiberius Gracchus, first learned Classics from his mom.)
Nor is it hard to see how the motto got attached to the story of Brutus and Caesar. After all, John Wilkes Booth's father was named Junius Brutus Booth and he assassinated Lincoln in a theater — just like Julius Caesar.
Wheeljack539
Member
John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln in the Ford's Theater but couldn't stick the landing; literally and figuratively.
Quasicat
Member
There is a pretty funny conspiracy theory about Booth getting away with it and ending up in Enid, Oklahoma in the 1890s.
Fascinating that the government has parts of Booth's spine and refuses to do any kind of DNA testing on it to prove/disprove this.
