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Three with W.Va. ties played roles after Lincoln assassination

CHARLESTON, W.Va. — It was 150 years ago this week when U.S. President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C.

Marshall University history professor Michael Woods said Lincoln’s death hit especially hard in the Mountain State, because it came only two years after signing West Virginia into statehood and just days following the end of the Civil War.

“The assassination was an incredibly polarizing event,” said Woods who characterized West Virginia as a “new and deeply divided state.”

“It’s a state where there had been significant union support, but in certain areas, especially the southeastern counties and the Eastern Panhandle, there’s quite a lot of sympathy for the confederacy and not a lot of enthusiasm for separate statehood.”

On April 14, 1865,  John Wilkes Booth, a Confederate supporter and actor, shot Lincoln in the theatre balcony. Lincoln died nine hours later on April 15.

Woods said three people with West Virginia connections played roles in the aftermath of Lincoln’s assassination.

William McPeck of Morgantown was a member the 6th West Virginia Cavalry and on guard outside Ford’s Theatre the night of April 14, 1865. He heard the shot that struck Lincoln.

“(McPeck) ran inside and ended up being one of six soldiers, all of whom were there at Ford’s Theatre really by chance, who carried Lincoln across the street to the boarding house owned by William Peterson where Lincoln died the next morning,” Woods said.

Everton Conger, an Ohio native, was with the 3rd West Virginia Cavalry and, as an intelligence officer, helped the soldiers with the 16th Regiment New York Cavalry who tracked Booth to his hiding place.

“Conger was actually on the scene when they finally cornered Booth in a barn in northeastern Virginia. Conger ordered Booth to surrender. Booth refused. Conger set the barn on fire,” Woods said. A member of the 16th New York shot Booth.

Gen. Thomas Harris, a Ritchie County native, served on the military commission that later tried the eight assassination conspirators, including Mary Surratt.

Woods teaches courses in U.S. history, the Civil War era and U.S. South at Marshall.

More than other Americans, Woods said West Virginians had to confront former enemies on a daily basis in the period after the Civil War. Lincoln’s assassination, at the start of the Reconstruction period, made the challenge even greater.

“Had he lived, I think he would been able to point to West Virginia as an example for the way to reincorporate other southern states back into the union,” Woods said on Tuesday’s MetroNews “Talkline.”





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