"President Abraham Lincoln, shot just five days later by the famous actor and Southern sympathizer John Wilkes Booth, has sometimes been called the last casualty of the war. But Lincoln could easily be seen as the first casualty of the failed post-war peace. Booth killed Lincoln in order to destroy the tyrant who had ravaged the South. After firing his pistol, he supposedly cried out "Sic semper tyrannus' – "Thus always to tyrants," the state motto of Virginia and the alleged words of Brutus upon assassinating Caesar – and while hiding out after the assassination he bemoaned his fate for "doing what Brutus was honored for." He was also known to revere Charlotte Corday and Felice Orsini. But Booth's assassination of Lincoln was also part of a larger plot to throw the North into chaos. Thus the killing could be called equal parts terrorism and tyrannicide. What is clear is that Lincoln died a martyr and that his death complicated efforts to heal the Union."