Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth on April 14, 1865, while attending a performance at Ford's Theatre in Washington, DC. General Robert E. Lee's surrender to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, Virginia, had taken place just five days earlier. Back in the city Lincoln once called home, 75,000 mourners filed past the president's coffin as he lay in state in Springfield's Old State Capitol. Today the man who became a myth is buried at Lincoln's Tomb State Historic Site.