On April 14—Good Friday—the president was shot by an actor and Confederate sympathizer, John Wilkes Booth, who had seethed about “nigger citizenship” while hatching a plot to kill the Great Emancipator. With a bullet in his bleeding skull, Lincoln died on the morning of April 15. Whitman grieved in verse: O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done, The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won . . . My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still, My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will.
