Booth may have made the decision to kill the President after hearing Lincoln deliver a speech urging Negro suffrage, according to Booth's former friend, Louis Weichmann. Weichmann spoke of his viewing of the the President's speech with Booth:
"I had never seen Mr. Lincoln up close and I knew he was a tall man, however nothing could have prepared me for the sight of him. A long shadow did he have. And his arms, when at his sides, touched near his knees. Very professionally he said that there would never be any suffrage based on differences in the way people look. Upon this, Booth turned to the two of us and said, “That means nigger citizenship. Now by God I’ll put him through!”
http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/lincolnconspiracy/booth.html#Biographic
Booth apparently had tired of acting. He was determined, finally, to react to the war. In october he traveled to a northern hotbed of Southern Sympathies, Montreal, Canada. After meeting with confederate agents, Booth returned to Maryland and began slowly to assemble a plan to kidnap Abraham Lincoln. His horrible plot had a humanitarian appeal. Booth hoped to trade he President back to the US in exchange for confederate prisoners of war hopelessly trapped in northern prison camps.
-A&E Biography
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