Abraham Lincoln is almost as hot as Barack Obama. With an exhibition at the Smithsonian to celebrate the two-hundreth year of his birth, February 12, the American president who ended slavery will be the subject of three new documentaries starting February 9. The story of John Wilkes Booth’s assassination of Lincoln and his subsequent attempted escape is told in vivid detail in a new episode of “American Experience.” Narrated by Oscar-winning actor Chris Cooper, the 90-minute documentary traces how Confederate sympathizer Booth was so angered by Lincoln’s reelection in 1864 that he first plotted to have the president kidnapped at Ford’s Theatre. When that fizzled, he came up with the plan that he thought would him a hero to Confederates who felt demoralized when Lincoln ended slavery.

Historians such as James L. Swanson, author of the best-selling book ‘Manhunt,” recount how it took federal agents 12 days to find Booth, a leading actor of his day with matinee-idol looks, who was holed up with an accomplice in the barn at the Garrett farm south of Fort Conway in Virginia. Agents set the barn on fire to smoke Booth out, but one young soldier couldn’t wait that long shot him as he tried to negotiate a deal. Booth kept a journal of his flight from his captors and read the appalled headlines of the day, which did not square with his aims to honor the Confederacy by killing the man who freed the slaves. Swanson and other experts, such as ubiquitous TV history queen Doris Kearns Goodwin, speak about Booth’s sense of inadequacy as an actor-he wanted to be a soldier-but his fame was his calling card and he used it to get inside the Lincoln’s box at Ford’s Theatre with a pistol.

The documentary movingly reports on the Lincoln death watch in a house across the street from Ford’s theatre and his 12-day journey home from Washington, D.C., to Illinois, where he was buried, with stops along the way in Philadelphia and New York. It was the reverse of the train trip he took when he first sworn in. Even as Andrew Johnson was sworn in as Lincoln’s successor, many blacks feared that the Emancipation Proclamation would be revoked and that their freedom would end. But it wasn’t.

In “Looking for Lincoln,” Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. addresses many of the controversies surrounding Abraham Lincoln – race, equality, religion, politics, and depression – by carefully interpreting evidence from those who knew him and scholars who study him today.

The History Channel takes a different approach to the Lincoln legacy in “Stealing Lincoln’s Body.” Before Lincoln finally came to rest in a steel-and-concrete-reinforced underground vault in Springfield, the President’s body was repeatedly exhumed and moved, his coffin frequently opened. In 1876, eleven years after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, a band of Chicago counterfeiters plotted to steal Lincoln’s body and hold it for ransom. Their plan was to demand $200,000 and the release of the gang’s master engraver, who was in prison in Illinois. The Secret Service-recently formed to deal with the country’s ballooning counterfeiting problem-infiltrated the gang with an informer. It also set in motion a cringe-inducing chain of events in which a group of self-appointed guardians took it upon themselves to protect Lincoln’s remains by any means necessary. This strange story of Lincoln at un-rest reveals how important this man was to so many, and perhaps our reluctance to let such a beloved and visionary leader go.

THE ASSASSINATION OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN

Monday, 9 p.m., PBS

LOOKING FOR LINCOLN

Wednesday, 9 p.m., PBS

STEALING LINCOLN’S BODY

Monday, February 16, 9 p.m., History Channel