Rumors of an assassination plot forced President-elect Lincoln to sneak through Charm City in 1861.
When Abraham Lincoln left Spring- field, Illinois, on February 11 to travel to his inauguration in Washington, he began a journey of unprecedented proportions that took him through seven states and countless towns and villages. En route, he delivered no fewer than 101 known speeches. Lincoln probably appeared in the flesh before at least three-quarters of a million people—surely more than had ever cast their eyes on any president of the United States in all of American history. His appearance in Philadelphia on February 21 mirrored the overall resounding triumph of the trip.
A Philadelphia paper wrote that 100,000 “old men and young men, wives and maidens, matrons and children, all anxious for a sight of the hero of the hour” choked the flag-festooned streets all the way to Lincoln’s hotel, the Continental House, cheering and waving handkerchiefs as Lincoln stood in an open carriage pulled by four plumed white horses.
First, appearing on the Continental’s balcony—thickly bearded now, predictably looking to one reporter “much more prepossessing than his portraits”—Lincoln acknowledged an official welcome from Mayor Alexander Henry and delivered some re – marks. Lincoln’s long day was not yet done, however, and after dining with his wife, Mary, at the hotel, he was obliged to perform receiving line duty along its main staircase beginning at 8:30 p.m., greeting well-wishers and also enduring the usual shoving, gapemouthed stares and endless small talk. Then at 10 he watched in awe as a dazzling fireworks show illuminated the Philadelphia night. Once the pyrotechnics had evaporated in the cold winter sky, Lincoln retreated for a secret conference that not only generated fireworks of its own, but also abruptly changed the spirit of the entire inaugural journey.
Norman Judd, a Republican leader and Lincoln’s friend, urgently requested that Lincoln visit his hotel room and meet there with Scottish-born sleuth Allan Pinkerton. The detective had advised Judd that he possessed evidence of a well-planned scheme to murder Lincoln when the president-elect arrived at Baltimore on the 23rd.
Judd had known about the plot for some time, and had received confirmation of it from Kate Warne, one of Pinkerton’s agents. Judd, frantic with worry, wanted Pinkerton himself to lay out the facts for Lincoln, who had remained stubbornly oblivious to concerns about his safety. The detective, who operated under the aliases E.I. Allen, J.H. Hutcheson or the code name “Plums,” had initially shared his discovery with his client Samuel M. Felton, president of the Philadelphia, Wilmington & Baltimore Railroad. Felton had recently hired him to investigate rumors that secessionists might sabotage his tracks.
The president-elect made his way to Judd’s room at around 10:15 p.m., deploying Colonel Elmer Ellsworth to guard the door against intruders. Eventually Ward Hill Lamon, Lincoln’s bodyguard, joined the meeting. While the men huddled there, Pinkerton later remembered, a large crowd milled noisily in the hallway outside, adding to the palpable tension. As Lincoln listened “very attentively,” Pinkerton methodically laid out the details of what he had learned.
Once the inaugural special pulled into Baltimore’s Calvert Street station, a gang of well-armed pro-secession “Bullies” planned to stage a diversionary brawl outside just as Lincoln entered the narrow vestibule leading out into the street. When policemen rushed out to investigate, as surely they would, Lincoln would be left “entirely unprotected and at the mercy of a mob of Secessionists who were to surround him at that time” and take his life. Members of the gang had enthusiastically drawn straws to determine which of them would have the “honor” of striking the fatal blow. “Calm and self-possessed” as he absorbed this distressing report, Pinkerton recalled, Lincoln’s “only sentiments appeared to be those of profound regret.” The detective was adamant: Lincoln must avoid making a public appearance while in Baltimore.
Judd injected an additional concern: the probable political fallout should Lincoln choose to heed this warning and alter his itinerary. Much as he believed the assassination threat was genuine, Judd predicted that dodging it would elicit “sneers and scoffs” from “friend & foe alike.” As Lincoln and Judd both knew, ridicule was, to a politician, a fate nearly as awful as death itself. Charges of cowardice were perhaps worse. Judd did not want his friend to do anything to “bring you into ridicule, because you are to bear the burthen of the thing.” Assuring Judd that he “appreciated these suggestions,” Lincoln replied without “agitation” that he “could stand anything that was necessary.”
Threats were nothing new to Lincoln—especially over the past few weeks, when his correspondence had been filled with warnings of “midnight and noonday assassin[s]” prepared to “destroy many lives to reach your plate with poison.” But he had long believed that assassination was not in the American character. “I never attached much importance,” he insisted, to rumors of “people who were intending to do me mischief…never wanted to believe any such thing.” Essentially corroborating Pinkerton’s version of the meeting, Lincoln admitted a few years later: “Pinkerton informed me that a plan had been laid for my assassination, the exact time when I expected to go through Baltimore being publicly known….He urged me to go right through with him to Washington that night.”
Leaving town immediately, however, was out of the question. “I cannot consent to this,” Lincoln declared. “I shall hoist the Flag on Independence Hall tomorrow morning and go to Harrisburg tomorrow, then I have fulfilled all my engagements, and if you”—addressing Judd—and “you Allan”—meaning Pinkerton—“think there is positive danger in my attempting to go through Baltimore openly according to the publicized programme…I shall endeavor to get away quietly from the people at Harrisburgh [sic] tomorrow evening and shall place myself in your [hands].” Lincoln’s “firmness of tone” indicated to Pinkerton “that there was no further arguing.” For tonight, the matter was closed. The president-elect rose to leave, and the meeting ended.
After elbowing his way through a persistent throng as he returned to his suite, Lincoln was shocked to find Frederick Seward, son of Secretary of State-designate William H. Seward, waiting for him. Frederick, who had been ushered into the room secretly by Lamon, had asked Lincoln’s son, Robert, to arrange an audience with the president-elect.
As Lincoln listened, Frederick reported that he had raced to Philadelphia from Washington at his father’s urgent request, armed with an important letter from the senator. Lincoln took it, sat down at a table and began reading its contents under the gaslight. There were actually three letters in the package Frederick Seward brought with him. First was a note from Frederick’s father, bearing the astonishing news that, based on an altogether separate and independent investigation, General Winfield Scott too believed Lincoln should “reconsider” his arrangements out of fear for his personal safety. Enclosed with Se – ward’s brief letter was another, from Scott to Seward, introducing Colonel Charles P. Stone, a young officer who had served under the old general in Mexico. Stone’s report completed the package and quoted a New York “detective officer” who had been on duty in Baltimore for three weeks and now believed “there is serious danger of violence to and the assassination of Mr. Lincoln in his passage through that city should the time of that passage be known.” A band of “rowdies holding secret meetings” there had expressed “threats of mobbing and violence.” The peril, the detective concluded, was not only “imminent,” but “one which the authorities & people in Baltimore cannot guard against[.]” Colonel Stone’s proposed solution eerily echoed Pinkerton’s: “All risk might be easily avoided by a change in the travelling arrangements which would bring Mr. Lincoln & a portion of his party through Baltimore by a night train without previous notice.”
Unmentioned—it would have meant little at the time, but a great deal just a few months later—was the fact that the “detective officer” in question, John A. Kennedy, superintendent of the New York Metropolitan Police, had taken his discoveries to Stone only after considering, then rejecting, the notion of sharing the incendiary secret with another Virginia-born officer: Robert E. Lee, who would earn his greatest fame fighting against Lincoln, not for him. Instead, in a matter of hours—for all the correspondence now in Lincoln’s hands bore that day’s date, February 21—Stone had rushed Kennedy’s warning to Scott, an alarmed Scott had shared it with Seward, and Seward had summoned his son and entrusted him to speed it to Lincoln “wherever he is.”
The president-elect “made no exclamation” as he digested this new evidence, and Frederick could detect “no sign of surprise in his face.” The young visitor remembered only that Lincoln looked a bit more careworn than in his recent pictures, a defect more than compensated for by a warm smile. Lincoln finally confided that, just moments before, another source had issued precisely the same warning— about “an attempt on my life in the confusion and hurly-burly of the reception at Baltimore.”
“Surely, Mr. Lincoln,” young Se – ward replied, “that is strong corroboration of the news I bring you.” Lincoln merely smiled again, admitting there might be “something in it” if “different persons, not knowing of each other’s work,” had uncovered “separate clues that led to the same result. But,” he cautioned, “if this is only the same story, filtered through two channels, and reaching me in two ways, then that don’t make it any stronger. Don’t you see?” Lincoln assured him, “I shall think it over carefully and decide it right, and I will let you know in the morning.”
There is strong additional evidence to support the belief that Lincoln knew about the Baltimore plot even before he began the first of that night’s dis – quieting meetings—weeks, in fact, before word of either Pinkerton’s or Kennedy’s separate investigations ever reached his ears. He surely retained his remarkable composure at the hotel that evening, since neither revelation came as a particular surprise.
Back on February 5, Henry C. Bowen, editor of the New York antislavery weekly The Independent, sent Lincoln a letter from Charles Gould reporting that “traitors” planned to “kill Mr. Lincoln on his way to Washington,” and advising that it would be “impossible” for him to “go in safety to the Capital when his progress is known to the public.” Gould had learned this from none other than Samuel Felton. The same railroad executive who hired Pinkerton had evidently leaked the preliminary results of his investigation to Gould more than two weeks before Judd learned of it and took the report officially to Lincoln. Weeks before the Pinkerton meeting, Gould was already adamant that the president take the needed precautions, pointing out “he is no longer simply Mr. Lincoln. We have elected him to the office of President; and on his life and his inauguration rests the question of government or revolution. We must not run a risk for the car which carries him to Washington, carries the welfare of a great nation.”
Thus the warnings Lincoln was asked to digest in Philadelphia were in a way not revelations at all, merely confirmations. Moreover, though he told his friends and advisers on February 21 that he would delay a final decision about how to confront the Baltimore threat, Lincoln already knew that, at best, his visit there would not unfold as planned.
Lincoln had already changed his mind about the accommodations required for the nine nights his family would spend in Washington before moving into the Executive Mansion. On February 15, writing from Cleveland, Lincoln had advised Congressman Elihu Washburne that he had “decided to stop at a public, rather than a private house when I reach Washington.” The congressman accordingly booked a suite of rooms for Lincoln at Willard’s Hotel.
Still, the question of how—and when—Lincoln would arrive remained unsettled as of 11 p.m. on February 21. As Lincoln retired for the night, Judd and Pinkerton, in concert with railroad and telegraph officials, worked hours longer to hash out a blueprint to spirit him safely through Baltimore. The advisers agonized over whom to tell and whom to exclude. With danger lurking, everyone now fell under suspicion.
Shortly after sunrise the next morning, his fully exposed open carriage preceded by a marching band and a cadre of aging Mexican War veterans, Lincoln calmly left the Continental House for an emotional visit to Independence Hall. He would make two speeches that cold, crystal-clear day, the first inside, and one outside the “sacred hall” where America had been born. Then it was to the plaza in front of the building, where a large wooden platform stood awaiting the dignitaries for a flag-raising ceremony.
Returning briefly to his hotel, then riding in yet another procession through still-crowded streets toward the West Philadelphia depot, Lincoln boarded the Prince of Wales car and after pausing briefly for another artillery salute, commenced his trip to Harrisburg by 9:30. Sometime during this 41⁄2-hour, 100-mile ride west, Judd laid out for Lincoln the elaborate plan that he, Pinkerton and a few loyal railroad and telegraph executives had concocted late the previous night to get the president-elect safely to Washington.
Lincoln would quietly leave Harrisburg on a special train around 6 that evening, arriving back in Philadelphia by 11 and secretly transferring there to the regular overnight train to Baltimore, then Washington. Only one person—yet to be determined—would accompany him on this final leg of the trip. Pinkerton would meet the party back in Philadelphia and escort it all the way to the capital. As a precaution, the cars speeding Lincoln to Baltimore would enjoy unimpeded right-of-way: every other train along the road would be sidetracked, and the telegraph lines in and out of Harrisburg would be cut to preclude leaks. William Wood, the inaugural manager, would be told nothing. Mary and the boys would follow out of Harrisburg the following morning as if nothing had occurred.
These whispered conferences on board the Harrisburg-bound special aroused considerable suspicion that morning. “Judd there is something up,” Lincoln’s secretary John Nicolay observed at one point. Like the secretary, Lamon and Ellsworth too concluded that “something was on foot” but “judiciously refrained” from asking questions. Judd arranged to brief the entire party before that evening’s dinner in Harrisburg.
Arriving in the state capital at 1:30 p.m., Lincoln finally gave the promised speech to the Pennsylvania State Assembly. By 3 p.m. on that unforgettable Washington’s Birthday, Lincoln returned to the Jones House, ostensibly to rest before dinner. Instead, he joined Judd and slipped into the hotel parlor to finally confide the details of the new security plan to their fellow travelers. Lincoln said little at the meeting, but to no one’s surprise, Colonel Edwin “Bull Head” Sumner loudly protested the scheme. Sneaking through Baltimore, the battle-toughened officer bellowed, “will be a d—d piece of cowardice,” and he wanted to “get a Squad of Cavalry Sir, cut our way to Washington Sir.” But Judd advised Sumner, “that view of the Case has already been presented to Mr. Lincoln” and ruled out.
After some thought, Lincoln’s reply was definitive: “Unless there are some other reasons besides ridicule,” he replied, almost sadly, “I am disposed to carry out Judd’s plan.” The most public inaugural journey in U.S. history would end in total secrecy.
The big decision made, the subject turned to who would accompany and guard the president-elect en route. Lincoln believed his wife would be satisfied with no other protector than Ward Hill Lamon. To prove he was up to the task, Lamon flashed his formidable personal arsenal: a “brace of fine pistols, a huge bowie knife, a black-jack and a pair of brass knuckles,” and even offered some of the weapons to Lincoln. But Pinkerton protested. The president-elect must not enter Washington armed, he said, arguing that “if fighting had to be done, it must be done by others.” The weary Lincoln concurred.
That evening around 5:45, someone interrupted Governor Andrew Curtin’s reception at the Jones House right on schedule, and tapped Lincoln on the shoulder to signal that the time had come for his early departure. Fearing he might attract too much attention by leaving so soon, Lincoln at first hesitated. Only after several more reminders did he finally rise, take Curtin by the arm, and stroll out the back door of the hall. The new governor, to whom the president-elect had now confided details of the Baltimore conspiracy and his revised itinerary, remembered that Lincoln “neither in his conversation or manner exhibited alarm or fear.”
Lincoln donned an old overcoat, but he would not wear his signature silk stovepipe hat. Instead he drew from his pocket a wide-brimmed model he had received as a gift in New York just days before. Before they left, Sumner stubbornly made one last attempt to join them. At the last possible minute, Judd tapped him on the shoulder to get his attention, and when the colonel whirled round, Lincoln’s carriage sped away. “A madder man,” Judd admitted, “you never saw.” Accompanied only by Lamon, Pennsylvania Railroad Superintendent G.C. Franciscus, a few railroad officials and a telegraph operator, Lincoln sped to the depot, boarded the two-car train that awaited them there, and headed east for Philadelphia. As soon as the train left the depot, a Pinkerton operative wired an update to his boss, using the agreed-upon, albeit irreverent, code word for the president-elect: “Nuts left at six—Everything as you directed—all is right.”
Enjoying unimpeded right-of-way, this first leg of the secret trip ended much sooner than anyone had predicted. The train pulled into the West Philadelphia depot at 10 p.m., nearly an hour before the sleeper was scheduled to leave a nearby station for Baltimore. After rendezvousing with Pinkerton and his operatives, Lincoln and Lamon stepped into another carriage, and with time to spare, occupied the intervening time rolling aimlessly through the streets of the city. During the carriage ride, Lincoln shared the news that William Seward believed 15,000 men were preparing “to blow up the railroad tracks” or “fire the train,” to prevent his safe arrival in Washington. “Here was a plot,” Lamon believed, “big enough to swallow up the little one.”
Just minutes before the Baltimore train was scheduled to pull away, Lincoln’s carriage slipped into the depot, pulled all the way up to the back of the sleeping car, and deposited its precious cargo through a rear door. Wearing his wide-brimmed felt hat and wrapped in a “Gentleman’s shawl”—another eyewitness described it as a “muffler”— Lincoln would have gone unrecognized even if he had been noticed.
Once on board, the president-elect was put to bed in a rear berth, the curtains securely drawn, and the train left on schedule. But Lincoln got little rest, since he was “so very tall that he could not lay straight in his berth.” Besides, the travelers were all too excited to sleep. Lincoln told the occasional joke “in an undertone,” recalled Pinkerton agent Warne, who was posing as the mysterious passenger’s sister. Otherwise the group maintained perfect silence. The only one among them who moved around was Pinkerton, who walked to the rear platform at regular intervals to look for “all safe” signals from operatives stationed with lanterns all along the route to Maryland.
Some four hours later, around 3:30 a.m., the train from Philadelphia steamed into Baltimore’s Calvert Street station. Warne quickly left for Pinkerton’s nearby safe house. It would hardly do for the press to learn that Lincoln had traveled to the city in a sleeping car accompanied by a woman.
Now would come perhaps the most delicate part of the journey. While the other passengers remained asleep, rail workers uncoupled the sleeping car from its engine and hitched it to a team of horses, which hauled it to the nearby Camden depot, there to link to an engine of the Baltimore & Ohio line for the final haul to Washington. Not a voice was heard until a drunken night watchman suddenly began pounding his club against a trackside box, shouting, “Captain, it’s 4 o’clock.” He kept up his cry—and his pounding—for at least 20 minutes, never varying his time estimate, never succeeding in doing more than rousing all the slumbering passengers. A mirthful Lincoln, said Pinkerton, seemed to enjoy the scene, “and made several witty remarks, showing that he was as full of fun as ever.”
With Lincoln now awake and much amused, the trains were noisily coupled. But its departure was delayed for a time, and as dawn neared, the station began springing to life. Pinkerton remembered hearing “the usual bustle and activity” outside, and the president-elect “joking with rare good humor” at the sounds around them. His mood changed only when music began floating in the air—“snatches of rebel harmony,” Pinkerton called it—first the strains of the anthem “Maryland My Maryland,” then the popular tune “Dixie.” Lincoln turned to the detective and observed: “No doubt there will be a great time in Dixie by and by.” Finally, just after 4 a.m., the Washington-bound train left Baltimore.
Two hours later, at 6 a.m. on Saturday, February 23, Pinkerton, Lamon and their famous charge slipped into the capital of the United States unrecognized—that is, nearly unrecognized. One man in the crowd inside the vast depot seemed to take note of the tall passenger who emerged from the cars and ambled across the terminal, looking “more like a well-to-do farmer… than the President of the United States.” After the president-elect passed him by, the stranger suddenly strode up, “looked very sharp at him,” lunged for Lincoln’s hand, exclaiming, “Abe, you can’t play that on me.”
Reacting quickly, Pinkerton—or perhaps Lamon; the record is unclear— made as if to strike him. By one account, Pinkerton actually landed a blow with his elbow—“staggering him back,” and then raised a fist to strike the intruder again—when Lincoln declared something like: “Don’t strike him! Don’t strike him! It is Washburne. Don’t you know him?”
And then, arm in arm with Congressman Elihu Washburne, who represented the sum and substance of his official welcoming delegation—Abraham Lincoln left the depot, and before the sun rose on a “mild and cloudy” day, boarded the horse-drawn carriage Washburne had ordered to wait, and “drove rapidly” off to the 14th Street side entrance of Willard’s Hotel, safely in Washington at last.
Exhausted, Lincoln asked nothing of proprietor Henry A. Willard when he arrived except whether he might have a spare pair of bed-slippers: He had misplaced his own. Glancing at his distinguished guest’s enormous boots, and realizing his own small-size foot – wear would never do, Willard quickly sent someone to fetch the pair owned by his wife’s long-limbed grandfather. Lincoln wore old William C. Bradley’s slippers for the rest of his stay.
To his colleagues, Pinkerton wired the good news: “Plums arrived here with Nuts this morning—all right.”
This article is adapted from Lincoln, President-Elect: Abraham Lincoln and the Great Secession Winter 1860- 1861, by Harold Holzer, published by Simon & Schuster and scheduled for release in fall 2008. For more on Lincoln, turn to “Resources,” P. 71.
Originally published in the December 2008 issue of Civil War Times. To subscribe, click here.