On April 15, 1865, Lincoln was gunned down in Ford’s Theater by John Wilkes Booth, a man sympathetic to the defeated Confederacy. In the years following the end of the Civil War and Lincoln’s assassination, his successor Andrew Johnson proved utterly incapable of unifying a fractured nation. Under Johnson, everyday life during the Reconstruction was a gauntlet of simmering hatred, short supplies, and an onslaught of new means for oppressing African Americans.