The Hour of Peril: The Secret Plot to Murder Lincoln Before the Civil War
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The Hour of Peril: The Secret Plot to Murder Lincoln Before the Civil War
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Overview
"It's history that reads like a race-against-the-clock thriller." —Harlan Coben
Daniel Stashower, the two-time Edgar award–winning author of The Beautiful Cigar Girl, uncovers the riveting true story of the "Baltimore Plot," an audacious conspiracy to assassinate Abraham Lincoln on the eve of the Civil War in THE HOUR OF PERIL.
In February of 1861, just days before he assumed the presidency, Abraham Lincoln faced a "clear and fully-matured" threat of assassination as he traveled by train from Springfield to Washington for his inauguration. Over a period of thirteen days the legendary detective Allan Pinkerton worked feverishly to detect and thwart the plot, assisted by a captivating young widow named Kate Warne, America's first female private eye.
As Lincoln's train rolled inexorably toward "the seat of danger," Pinkerton struggled to unravel the ever-changing details of the murder plot, even as he contended with the intractability of Lincoln and his advisors, who refused to believe that the danger was real. With time running out Pinkerton took a desperate gamble, staking Lincoln's life—and the future of the nation—on a "perilous feint" that seemed to offer the only chance that Lincoln would survive to become president. Shrouded in secrecy—and, later, mired in controversy—the story of the "Baltimore Plot" is one of the great untold tales of the Civil War era, and Stashower has crafted this spellbinding historical narrative with the pace and urgency of a race-against-the-clock thriller.
A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of 2013
Winner of the 2014 Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime
Winner of the 2013 Agatha Award for Best Nonfiction
Winner of the 2014 Anthony Award for Best Critical or Non-fiction Work
Winner of the 2014 Macavity Award for Best Nonfiction
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781250023322 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 01/29/2013 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 368 |
| Sales rank: | 38,351 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Daniel Stashower is an acclaimed biographer and narrative historian and winner of the Edgar, Agatha, and Anthony awards, as well as the Raymond Chandler Fulbright Fellowship in Detective Fiction. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Smithsonian Magazine, AARP: The Magazine, National Geographic Traveler, and American History as well as other publications.
His books include The Hour of Peril, Teller of Tales, and The Beautiful Cigar Girl.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER ONE
THE APPRENTICE
Let none falter, who thinks he is right, and we may succeed.
—ABRAHAM LINCOLN, Springfield, Illinois, 1839
THE PECULIAR MARCH OF EVENTS that carried Allan Pinkerton to Baltimore had begun twenty-two years earlier—on the night of November 3, 1839—on a rain-soaked field in South Wales. At that time, Abraham Lincoln was still a young legislator in Illinois, voicing early concern over voting rights and the “injustice and bad policy” of slavery. An ocean away, Pinkerton was also throwing himself at what he called “the higher principles of liberty,” even at the risk of his own freedom.
Pinkerton had traveled hundreds of miles from his home in Glasgow to take his place amid a swelling band of protest marchers as they prepared to descend on the Welsh town of Newport. These “crazed and misguided zealots,” as one newspaper called them, were the vanguard of the Chartist agitation, a working-class labor movement struggling to make its voice heard in Britain. Pinkerton, though barely twenty years old, thought of himself as “the most ardent Chartist in Scotland.”
Ragged and footsore, Pinkerton moved among the demonstrators as they huddled beside campfires, listening to firebrand speeches and waiting for reinforcements that would never come. They were, as Pinkerton himself would admit, a sorry-looking group. A few had tattered blankets pulled tight around their shoulders for protection against a chilling rain; others went barefoot in the squelching mud.
The Chartists’ demands, as spelled out in the “People’s Charter” of 1838, included universal suffrage, equitable pay, and other democratic reforms for Britain’s “toiling class.” Lately, the movement had been split by internal conflict, with one faction espousing nonviolent “moral force” to achieve its goals, and another comprised of “physical force men,” who were prepared—perhaps even eager—to take up arms. Matters came to a crisis in July 1839, when the House of Commons rejected a national petition bearing over a million signatures. The following month saw the charismatic Chartist leader Henry Vincent convicted on conspiracy charges, spurring the physical-force wing of the movement toward a large-scale uprising.
Henry Vincent had been imprisoned at Monmouth Castle, outside of Newport, and it was thought that several other Chartist leaders were being held in the town’s Westgate Hotel. As thousands of marchers, many of them miners and mill workers, massed on the outskirts of town, it became clear that they intended to demonstrate their “fervid passions” to the country at large. Exactly how they intended to do so remains a subject of debate. Many believe that the marchers planned to storm the Westgate Hotel and free the prisoners they thought were inside. Others contend that a massive demonstration was planned to secure the release of Henry Vincent from his castle cell, perhaps signaling a nationwide uprising in support of the Chartist agenda. In any event, there were iron pikes and muskets in the hands of many of the marchers, suggesting that their intent could not have been entirely peaceful.
The original plan called for the marchers to advance on Newport under cover of darkness, but it was past nine o’clock in the morning before they finally descended on the town. The delay proved costly: Military forces from a nearby royal regiment had used the time to reinforce the hotel and surrounding buildings. As the rain-soaked, disorganized laborers massed in the village square, they found themselves facing off against a small but well-armed company of battle-trained soldiers.
The details of what followed are not entirely clear. According to some accounts, the Chartists surged forward and banged at the shuttered windows of the hotel to demand the release of the prisoners, only to be met with a withering volley of musket fire. Within minutes, the ranks broke and the marchers fell back in wild disorder, leaving their weapons scattered on the ground. The defending soldiers now turned their guns on a handful of Chartists who had managed to force their way inside the hotel. In moments, said a witness, “there was a scene dreadful beyond expression—the groans of the dying—the shrieks of the wounded, the pallid, ghostly countenances and the bloodshot eyes of the dead, in addition to the shattered windows, and the passages ankle-deep in gore.”
When the smoke cleared, some twenty-two men lay dead, and many others were grievously injured. Most had scattered as the first shots rained down on their heads, fleeing back to their homes, as one witness recorded, like “so many yelping dogs gone to ground.” In the aftermath, many of the Chartist marchers would be captured and their leaders condemned to be hung, drawn, and quartered.
“It was a bad day,” recalled Allan Pinkerton. “We returned to Glasgow by the back streets and lanes, more like thieves than honest working men.” The lessons of the Newport Rising, as the unhappy episode came to be known, would remain with Pinkerton to the end of his days. Within a few years, he would gain international fame as the leading figure of a new type of law enforcement, followed by no small measure of infamy as a strikebreaker, but Pinkerton never entirely fell out of step with the Newport marchers in his efforts for social justice. The tension between the ideals of his youth and the obligations of the career he created for himself—like the split between the moral-force and physical-force Chartists—created a strain in his character that he never entirely resolved. He understood the impulses of the poor and disenfranchised, whether they were criminals or enemy soldiers, but this only sharpened the edge of his ambition. Decades later, while commenting on labor unrest in America, Pinkerton offered a rare public glimpse of the beliefs he had forged in Scotland: “I believe that I of all others have earned the right to say plain things to the countless toilers who were engaged in these strikes. I say I have earned this right. I have been all my lifetime a working man.” Life in America, he insisted, presented common workingmen with opportunities he had been denied in his homeland, with a chance to “rise above their previous conditions, and reach a nobler and happier condition of life.”
If Pinkerton’s words sound naïve and self-serving to the modern ear, it was a sentiment Abraham Lincoln would have recognized. “Twenty-five years ago I was a hired laborer,” Lincoln once declared. “The hired laborer of yesterday labors on his own account today, and will hire others to labor for him tomorrow. Advancement—improvement in condition—is the order of things in a society of equals.”
* * *
ALLAN PINKERTON WAS BORN in a two-room tenement flat on Muirhead Street in Glasgow, Scotland, in the summer of 1819. His family lived in the area on the south bank of the River Clyde known as the Gorbals, infamous at that time for its crime, brothels, and “persons in narrow circumstances.” Named for his grandfather, a well-known blacksmith, Allan was one of eleven children, at least four of whom died in infancy. His father, William, a hand-loom weaver, died when Allan was barely ten years old, forcing him to leave school and take a job as an errand boy. He worked “from dawn to dusk for pennies,” as he later recalled, in the shop of a pattern maker named Neil Murphy, who had been a friend of his father. After work, the boy would stand on the street, waiting for his mother, Isabella, to return from her job at a spinning mill. A high point during this cheerless period—and a memory he would often recall in his old age—was the night she came home cradling a single fresh egg for their evening meal.
Pinkerton soon grew restless with what he called the “dreary existence” of an errand boy. At the age of twelve, he took the bold step of resigning in favor of an apprenticeship with a Glasgow cooper named William McAuley, learning the craft of making watertight casks, barrels, and kegs. By the age of eighteen, Pinkerton had earned his journeyman’s card and joined the Coopers’ Union, but by this time McAuley had no further work for him. Pinkerton took to the road and became a “tramp cooper,” traveling the country to pick up piecemeal work at breweries and distilleries. He sent whatever money he could spare back to his mother in Glasgow, but he often found himself living so close to the bone that he slept outdoors and went without food.
Friends from this period described Pinkerton as quiet and rather serious, with penetrating blue eyes beneath a coarse thatch of reddish hair. Most accounts refer to him as a short or “diminutive” man, though his height is sometimes listed as five eight—by no means small for the time. A famous photograph taken many years later shows Pinkerton standing with Abraham Lincoln at the Antietam battlefield. The image gives an initial impression of Pinkerton as undersized and somewhat hunched, though in fact he appears to be only half a head shorter than Lincoln, who was six four. In a second image taken at the same time, however, Lincoln has shifted his stance and Pinkerton appears to have lost several inches in stature. Pinkerton would likely have been pleased by the disparity; in later years, he made a point of masking his appearance by frequently changing his style of dress and facial hair, making it easier to go undercover. At a time when Lincoln cultivated a beard to make his appearance more distinctive, Pinkerton sought to go unnoticed.
As a young barrel maker, Pinkerton earned a reputation as a hard worker, but he was also known for his quick temper and aggressive manner. An avid reader, he grew passionate about social reform, and it was known that he would not back down from a fight over the political issues of the day. His years of work with heavy tools, including a ten-pound cooper’s hammer, gave him a thick torso and powerful arms. Friends sometimes remarked on his top-heavy gait; he tended to tilt forward, as if prepared at any moment to wade into a brawl.
After the Newport Rising, the youthful strain of radicalism in Pinkerton’s character hardened into something dark and implacable. He knew that he had been lucky to escape Newport with his liberty. The death sentences handed out at the time were later commuted, but dozens of his fellow Chartists would be transported to Australia. Still, Pinkerton was undaunted, and he threw himself back into the fight with even greater vigor. Within weeks, after some “rather disagreeable talk” at a gathering of the Glasgow Universal Suffrage Association, Pinkerton stalked out of the meeting hall and launched a group of his own, the Northern Democratic Association, for the purpose of ratifying the People’s Charter—“peaceably if we may, forcibly if we must.”
Pinkerton soon fell under the sway of a controversial activist named Julian Harney, later a friend and supporter of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who was often described as the Chartist movement’s “enfant terrible.” In January of 1840, when Pinkerton invited Harney to address an overflow crowd at Glasgow’s Lyceum Theatre, there were loud jeers and catcalls from the rank and file, many of whom found the young firebrand’s views too extreme. Outraged, Pinkerton sprang to his feet—his face scarlet and his fists clenched—ready to take on all comers. After a few tense moments, cooler heads prevailed and the lecture went ahead as scheduled.
Not all of Pinkerton’s political meetings were so contentious. In the summer of 1841, he called on the choirmaster of a local Unitarian church to arrange a night of song at a neighborhood pub as a “whip round” fund-raiser for his Northern Democratic Association. Pinkerton attended the Thursday-night concert with his mother, and as the music began, he found himself unable to take his eyes off the choir’s young soprano. Though only fourteen years old at the time, she had the bearing and polish of a seasoned performer, and she soon brought the crowd to its feet with a spirited rendition of a forbidden Chartist song. Hopelessly smitten, Pinkerton took his friend Robbie Fergus aside to learn all he could about the young singer. She was a bookbinder’s apprentice from the nearby town of Paisley, Fergus told him, and her name was Joan Carfrae. At future concerts, Pinkerton made a point of sitting in the front row, wearing his best and perhaps only suit. He soon took it upon himself to escort Miss Carfrae home after each appearance. “I got to sort of hanging around her, clinging to her, so to speak,” Pinkerton later wrote, “and I knew I couldn’t live without her.”
Looking back on his courtship of Joan Carfrae in later years, Pinkerton recalled his distress, during the winter months of 1842, when a king’s warrant was issued for his arrest as a prominent leader of the Chartist movement. “I had become an outlaw with a price on my head,” he wrote. A number of his fellow Chartists were rounded up, but by the time the police sought out Pinkerton at his mother’s flat, the young cooper had fled. For several months, Pinkerton’s friends helped to hide him from the law, but he knew it was only a matter of time before he landed in jail, awaiting transportation to Australia. By this stage, many of his friends and Chartist colleagues had already decamped for America, including his friend Robbie Fergus, who had recently established himself in Chicago. Realizing that his options in Scotland were narrowing, Pinkerton resolved to follow Fergus and the others.
Joan Carfrae soon got wind of the plan. “When I had the price set on my head, she found me where I was hiding,” Pinkerton recalled, “and when I told her I was all set up to making American barrels for the rest of my life and ventured it would be a pretty lonesome business without my bonnie singing bird around the shop, she just sang me a Scotch song that meant she’d go too, and God bless her she did.”
In Pinkerton’s memory of the event, he and Joan were married secretly and then—after a hasty good-bye to his mother—smuggled aboard a ship bound for America, under the wing of the kindly Neil Murphy, the family friend who had given Pinkerton his start as a ten-year-old errand boy. “Within a few hours,” runs one early recounting of the drama, “he was both a married man and a wanted criminal fleeing to the New World.”
This is an agreeably dramatic story, but Pinkerton’s account would not have withstood the scrutiny of a sharp-eyed private detective. If the Glasgow police had truly been determined to arrest him, they would have had ample notice of his whereabouts. According to parish records, Pinkerton and Joan Carfrae were married in a public ceremony in a Glasgow church on March 13, 1842. No hint of secrecy or subterfuge is evident in the marriage register, and the Scottish tradition of the “proclamation of the banns”—a public announcement of the intent to marry, posted on three consecutive Sundays so as to allow any lawful impediments to come to light—was duly observed. In fact, the only unusual feature of the wedding appears to have been the bride’s age. Though she claimed to be eighteen, Joan Carfrae was, in fact, just two months past her fifteenth birthday.
If Pinkerton romanticized some of the details, his reasons for seeking a fresh start remained clear: “I know what it is to strive and grope along, with paltry remuneration and no encouragement save that of the hope and ambition planted in every human heart,” he wrote many years later. “I have been a poor lad in Scotland, buffeted and badgered by boorish masters. I have worked weary years through the ‘prentice period, until, by the hardest application, I conquered a trade. I know what it is, from personal experience, to be the tramp journeyman; to carry the stick and bundle; to seek work and not get it; and to get it, and receive but a pittance for it, or suddenly lose it altogether and be compelled to resume the weary search. In fact, I know every bitter experience that the most laborious of laboring men have been or ever will be required to undergo.”
Privately, his memories of his start in life were harsher still. In a letter written nearly twenty years later, at the start of the Civil War, Pinkerton expressed a sentiment that would color every aspect of his new life in America. “In my native country,” he declared, “I was free in name, but a slave in fact.”
Slave was not a word Pinkerton bandied about lightly. Within three years of his flight from Scotland, he would be running a station on the fabled Underground Railroad, helping runaway slaves make their way north to freedom.
Copyright © 2013 by Daniel Stashower
Table of Contents
Author's Note vii
Introduction: Long, Narrow Boxes 1
Part 1 The Cooper and the Rail-Splitter 7
Prologue: His Hour Had Not Yet Come 9
1 The Apprentice 17
2 How I Became a Detective 25
3 Ardent Spirits 37
4 Pink Lady 47
5 Let Us Dare to Do Our Duty 59
6 It's Coming Yet 69
Part 2 Plums and Nuts 77
7 A Pig-Tail Whistle 79
8 Mob town 95
9 Suspicions of Danger 107
10 Hostile Organizations 119
11 The Man and the Hour 133
12 If I Alone Must Do It 145
13 A Postponed Rebellion 159
14 A Rabid Rebel 169
15 A Single Red Ballot 181
16 Whitewash 195
17 The Music Agent 211
18 A Few Determined Men 221
19 An Assault of Some Kind 233
20 The Assassin's Knife 243
Part 3 The Martyr and the Scapegoat 257
21 The Flight of Abraham 259
22 The Hour of Peril 269
23 Some Very Tall Swearing 285
Epilogue: An Infamous Lie 303
Acknowledgments 333
Select Bibliography 335
Index 341
Preface
•
THE COOPER and THE RAIL-SPLITTER
PROLOGUE
HIS HOUR HAD NOT YET COME
•
Security that day was the tightest Washington had ever seen. Sharpshooters crouched on the rooftops along Pennsylvania Avenue and in the windows of the Capitol. Armed soldiers— many of them “in citizen's dress”— fanned out through the crowd, looking for agitators. Companies of uniformed volunteers swelled the ranks of the parade marchers, and a corps of West Point cadets readied themselves to form a sort of flying wedge around the presidential carriage. A cavalry officer riding nearby used his spurs to keep his mount— and those nearby— in an “uneasy state,” making it difficult for a marksman to get off a shot “between the dancing horses.” Inauguration Day— March 4, 1861— found the city tensed for a blow.
Just past noon, an elegant horse- drawn carriage rolled to a stop at the side entrance of Willard's Hotel on Fourteenth Street, two blocks east of the White House. Looking gray and doddery, President James Buchanan eased himself down from the open coach. The Old Public Functionary, as he was known, had just departed the Executive Mansion for the last time as president. In keeping with the solemnity of the occasion, he wore a formal but out- of- date swallowtail coat and an immense white cravat that spread over his chest “like a poultice.” He appeared thoroughly worn- out, one observer noted, and had few political allies left to mourn his exit. “The sun, thank God, has risen upon the last day of the administration of James Buchanan,” declared the New York World.
Willard's Hotel, the city's largest, was packed to capacity for the inaugural festivities, with proprietor Henry A. Willard booking an average of three people to a room. In the words of Nathaniel Hawthorne, the stately six- story building could be “much more justly called the centre of Washington and the Union than either the Capitol, the White House, or the State Department.” This had been especially true since the arrival ten days earlier of President- elect Abraham Lincoln, whose presence in the hotel had sparked a “quadrennial revel” of visitors. “Everybody may be seen there,” Hawthorne would write. “You exchange nods with governors of sovereign States; you elbow illustrious men, and tread on the toes of generals.”
The arrival of President Buchanan would mark the end to the political scrum. Pausing for a moment outside the hotel, Buchanan removed his low- crowned silk hat and passed through the side entrance. Moments later, he reemerged, walking arm in arm with Abraham Lincoln. The president- elect wore a new black cashmere suit, which had been made for him in Chicago, and carried a gold- tipped ebony cane. As the two men stepped into the waiting carriage, a group of soldiers standing near the hotel entrance snapped to attention, and a Marine band struck up “Hail to the Chief.” Lincoln smiled and tipped his stovepipe hat, but his face appeared drawn and even more heavily lined than usual. He had been up most of the night, laboring over a fi nal draft of his inaugural address. Moments earlier, while waiting for Buchanan to arrive, he had sat jotting notes as his son Robert read the speech aloud, giving him a better sense of how the words would strike the ears of his listeners. Distracted by this last- minute tinkering, Lincoln left Willard's Hotel without paying his tab. Several weeks later, when the lapse was brought to his attention, he sent the money over from the White House with a note of apology.
Lincoln and Buchanan sat side by side as their driver swung the carriage onto Pennsylvania Avenue, signaling the start of a “glad and sumptuous” parade that would carry them to the Capitol. The hour- long pro cession featured fl oats, marching bands, columns of veterans of the War of 1812, and a richly appointed “tableau car” carrying thirty- four “beauteous little girls,” each representing a state of the Union. A throng of some 25,000 people crowded along both sides of the broad avenue. Many in the crowd had come from out of town to witness the proceedings, and a few had been obliged to spend the night sleeping on the pavement after being turned away at the city's overbooked hotels. Those who could not get a clear view scrambled for higher ground. “The trees upon the corners,” reported a Philadelphia paper, were “as full of small boys as an apple tree in fruit-bearing season.”
The temperature that afternoon had turned cool and bracing, and it is likely that the atmosphere in the presidential carriage was chillier still. During his campaign, Lincoln had criticized Buchanan sharply, though neither man escaped censure in the press as Inauguration Day approached, especially in the South: “An imbecile official is succeeded by a stupid Rail Splitter,” declared an Atlanta newspaper. As the carriage neared the Capitol, however, Buchanan is said to have struck a conciliatory note. Anticipating his return to his estate in Pennsylvania, the outgoing president turned to his successor. “My dear sir,” he said, “if you are as happy in entering the White House as I shall feel on returning to Wheatland, you are a happy man indeed.”
Lincoln, by all accounts, gave a delicate reply: “Mr. President, I cannot say that I shall enter it with much plea sure, but I assure you that I shall do what I can to maintain the high standards set by my illustrious predecessors who have occupied it.”
Barely two and a half years had elapsed since Lincoln had launched his campaign for the United States Senate— and the historic series of debates against Stephen A. Douglas— with his famous warning of the dangers of disunion over the issue of slavery: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” Now, as Lincoln prepared to take the oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution” as president of the United States, many of the diplomats and politicians gathered at the Capitol believed that a civil war was inevitable and that Lincoln would take office only to preside over the disintegration of the Union. Almost at that very moment, some seven hundred miles away in Montgomery, Alabama, the “Stars and Bars” flag of the Confederacy was being raised at the state capitol, with seven stars to represent the seven states that had already seceded.
“A more enviable, but at the same time more delicate and more hazardous lot than that accorded to Abraham Lincoln never fell to any member of this nation,” wrote journalist Henry Villard in the New York Herald. “The path he is about to walk on may lead to success, glory, immortality, but also to failure, humiliation and curses upon his memory. He may steer clear of the rock of disunion and the shoal of dissension among those that elevated him to the office he is about to assume, and safely conduct the Ship of State from amidst the turbulence of fanaticism and lawlessness to the port of peace and reunion. But he may, on the other hand, take his place at the helm of the craft only to sink with it.”
In keeping with the gravity of the moment, Lincoln had spent weeks laboring over his inaugural address, which he saw as an opportunity to pull the divided nation back from crisis. The president- elect sought a great deal of advice about the speech, but even his closest advisers were at odds over whether he should extend an olive branch to the South or fire a warning shot. Lincoln himself initially favored a strong, even confrontational message, stating that the Union would be preserved at all costs, that secession was illegal, and that he, as commander in chief, intended to enforce the law of the land. Toward that end, he planned to close the address with a ringing, provocative challenge: “In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war . . . With you, and not with me, is the solemn question of 'Shall it be peace, or a sword?' “
As Inauguration Day approached, however, Lincoln moderated the warlike tone, acting on the counsel of advisers such as William H. Seward, his designated secretary of state, to display “the magnanimity of a victor.”
If the speech were delivered as originally drafted, Seward believed, both Virginia and Mary land would immediately secede, effectively cutting off Washington from the Northern states. “Every thought that we think ought to be conciliatory, forbearing and patient,” he insisted.
Even as Lincoln revised and polished his address, however, there were many who felt that the moment for healing had passed. “Mr. Lincoln entered Washington the victim of a grave delusion,” said Horace Greeley, the famed publisher of the New-York Tribune. “His faith in reason as a moral force was so implicit that he did not cherish a doubt that his Inaugural Address, whereon he had bestowed much thought and labor, would, when read throughout the South, dissolve the Confederacy as frost is dissipated by the vernal sun.”
In order for Lincoln to deliver the address, however, he had to make it safely through the brief, final leg of his pro cession to the Capitol, a journey that had begun three weeks earlier in Springfield, Illinois. Many of Lincoln's most trusted advisers believed that his life had been in danger at every moment, especially during the thirteen days he had spent aboard the Lincoln Special, the private train that carried him on his winding, disjointed path to Washington. Even now, on the very doorstep of the presidency, many feared that there were sinister forces at work that would prevent Lincoln from taking the oath of office. The papers were filled with “persistent rumors” of an armed uprising, with a force of men numbering in the thousands poised to descend on Washington. Others spoke of groups of assassins hidden within the throngs at the Capitol grounds. “There is some apprehension felt concerning the possible action of a large gang of Plug- Uglies' who are here from Baltimore,” reported the previous day's New York Times. “Strange to say, heavy bets are pending on the question of his safety through tomorrow's exercises, and great anxiety is felt at Head- quarters concerning certain unpublished designs.” Lincoln himself had received anonymous threats of violent opposition to the inauguration. “Beware the Ides of March,” warned one correspondent, “the Suthron people will not Stand your administration.” Another spoke of a “sworn band of 10, who have resolved to shoot you in the inaugural pro cession.” Lincoln waved such threats aside, the Times reported, and remained utterly unfazed: “He says, 'I am here to take what is my right, and I shall take it. I anticipate no trouble, but should it come I am prepared to meet it.”
Though steps were taken to keep the security measures as inconspicuous as possible, some observers were appalled by the seemingly belligerent display of military force. “Nothing could have been more ill- advised or more ostentatious,” declared an anonymous diarist of the day. “I never expected to experience such a sense of mortification and shame in my own country as I felt today, in entering the Capitol through hedges of Marines armed to the teeth.” Not surprisingly, the Southern press seized on the unprecedented show of force to heap scorn on the incoming president. “I have seen today such a sight as I could never have believed possible at the capital of my country,” wrote a journalist in the Charleston Mercury,“an inauguration of a President surrounded by armed soldiery, with loaded pieces and fixed bayonets.” Lt. Gen. Winfield Scott, the seventy-four-year- old commanding general of the United States, offered no apologies. Convinced of the existence of a plot against Lincoln, the old soldier spent inauguration day commanding a battery of light artillery on Capitol Hill. “I shall plant cannon at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue,” he declared, “and if any of the Mary land or Virginia gentlemen who have become so threatening and troublesome of late show their heads, or even venture to raise a finger, I shall blow them to Hell!”
At a few minutes past 1:00 p.m., the inaugural pro cession arrived at the Capitol, with its new, half- finished steel dome obscured by scaffolding. Uniformed volunteers arrayed themselves in a double row along the length of the building, forming a human barrier between the crowd and a square-roofed wooden canopy that had been erected at the east portico. Lincoln and Buchanan, meanwhile, were escorted into the Senate Chamber along a makeshift covered walkway, which had been layered with planks to guard against the possibility of sniper fi re. Once inside, Lincoln appeared “grave and impassive as an Indian martyr” during the swearing- in of his vice president, Hannibal Hamlin. The outgoing president, meanwhile, looked pale and distracted. “Mr. Buchanan sighed audibly, and frequently,” noted a correspondent from the New York Times, “but whether from reflection upon the failure of his Administration, I can't say.”
At about 1:30 p.m., a long line of politicians and dignitaries, including the justices of the Supreme Court, filed beneath the unfinished dome of the Capitol rotunda and passed through the doors leading outside to the east portico. As Lincoln emerged at the top of the Capitol steps, he received a “most glorious shout of welcome” from the crowd below.
At the bottom of the stairs, beneath the wooden canopy, stood a “miserable little rickety table” holding a pitcher of water and a glass. After introductory remarks by his friend Edward D. Baker, Lincoln— looking “pale, and wan, and anxious”— stepped forward to speak. For a moment, he hesitated, searching for a place to set down his hat. Stephen Douglas, the Illinois Democrat who had so vigorously contested Lincoln's bid for both the Senate and the White House, happened to be seated close by. Seeing Lincoln's predicament, he stepped forward to assist his former rival. “If I cannot be President,” Douglas is supposed to have said, “I can at least be his hat-bearer.” The Times correspondent, eager for one last dig at the outgoing president, noted that Buchanan, “who was probably sleepy and tired, sat looking as straight as he could at the toe of his right foot.”
For some moments, the president- elect stood quietly and gathered himself, weighing down the loose pages of his speech with his ebony cane as he adjusted his eyeglasses. “The ten thousand threats that he should be assassinated before he should take the oath did not impel him to make a gesture implying fear or haste,” observed the New-York Tribune, “and he stood forth a conspicuous mark for the villains who had threatened to shoot him as he read.” When at last Lincoln began to speak, one listener recalled, his voice “rang out over the acres of people before him with surprising distinctness.”
No incoming president had ever faced such a balancing act in trying to appease so bitterly divided a country, a dilemma that cartoonist Thomas Nast neatly captured in a double portrait called The President's Inaugural.
In one panel, Lincoln appeared as an angel of peace, waving palm garlands over a caption that read: “This is the way the North receives it.” But the facing panel showed Lincoln as a Roman centurion with his foot pressing down on a vanquished foe, brandishing a sword over the words “This is the way the South receives it.”
Both sides found ample evidence in Lincoln's words to support their differing views. The speech contained many warnings to the South about the consequences of hostile action. “Physically speaking, we cannot separate,”
Lincoln declared, adding that the laws of the Union would be “faithfully executed in all the states.” At the same time, however, he insisted that there was no need for “bloodshed or violence,” a point he underscored as the address concluded with a ringing expression of hope for reconciliation:
”I am loth to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic cords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
The address completed, Lincoln stepped back and bowed his head. Then, in one of the day's many ironies, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney stepped forward to administer the oath of office. Taney, an eighty- three- year- old Maryland slaveholder, had performed this service six times previously, stretching back to the inauguration of Martin Van Buren, in 1837. More recently, Taney had delivered the majority opinion in the notorious Dred Scott v. Sanford case, declaring among other things that slaves were entitled to no protections under the Constitution, and that Congress had no authority to prohibit slavery in federal territories. The decision had had a galvanizing effect on the abolitionist movement and had helped to propel Abraham Lincoln into the national spotlight. Now, as the slavery issue pushed the country to the brink of war, Taney was obliged to swear in one of his most outspoken critics as the sixteenth president of the United States.
For all the challenges that lay ahead, which Lincoln himself described as greater than those faced by George Washington, he had already met the first test of his presidency: He had survived his journey to the inaugural ceremony. “No mean courage was required to face the probabilities of the hour,” wrote Frederick Douglass, the famed abolitionist. The new president had “stood up before the pistol or dagger of the sworn assassin, to meet death from an unknown hand, while upon the very threshold of the office to which the suffrages of the nation had elected him.” Horace Greeley concurred, recalling his own sense of foreboding as Lincoln delivered the inaugural address. “I sat just behind him as he read it,” Greeley wrote, “expecting to hear its delivery arrested by the crack of a rifle aimed at his heart.”
For Greeley, at least, Lincoln's survival appeared to be a sign of providence.
“It pleased God to postpone the deed,” he concluded, “though there was forty times the reason for shooting him in 1860 than there was in '65, and at least forty times as many intent on killing or having him killed. No shot was then fired, however; for his hour had not yet come.”
Not even Greeley, who had followed Lincoln's fortunes closely for more than a dozen years, knew what a near thing it had been, and the one person who could have told him was nowhere to be seen. Allan Pinkerton, the man who had done more than any other to ensure the peaceful transfer of power that day, had long since returned to Baltimore to chase down rumors of a fresh plot against the new administration. “The Eye,” as he was known, still had work to do.
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