Lincoln’s Special departed midmorning, now with his wife and two youngest sons, Willie, ten, and Tad, eight, aboard as well.

  Ohio

  “Pimp!”

  February 13–15

  Lincoln’s Special reached Columbus, Ohio, at two p.m. on Wednesday, February 13, the day Congress was to certify the electoral vote; the day also that Virginia was to begin its secession convention. But as the hours and miles passed, Lincoln heard nothing. His train had expanded to three cars. Among the riders invited to travel with him on this leg was Larz Anderson, Major Anderson’s brother, from Cincinnati. The weather was “magnificent,” according to journalist Villard.

  In Columbus, Lincoln was greeted by cannon fire and escorted by soldiers to the state house, where the Ohio legislature had convened to greet him. He gave a brief but curious speech that seemed crafted to counteract the aggression he had extemporaneously signaled in Indianapolis.

  “I have not maintained silence from any want of real anxiety,” he said. “It is a good thing that there is no more than anxiety, for there is nothing going wrong. It is a consoling circumstance that when we look out, there is nothing that really hurts anybody. We entertain different views upon political questions, but nobody is suffering anything. This is a most consoling circumstance, and from it we may conclude that all we want is time, patience and a reliance on that God who has never forsaken this people.”

  Even as he said this, however, concern in Washington mounted that the electoral count might be disrupted. That day crowds of irate Southerners had gathered in Washington and converged on the Capitol clamoring to get inside. General Scott, however, was well prepared. Soldiers manned the entrances and demanded to see passes before letting anyone in. Scott had positioned caches of arms throughout the building. A regiment of troops in plainclothes circulated among the crowd to stop any trouble before it started. The throng outside grew annoyed at being barred from entry and began firing off obscenities like grapeshot. If words could kill, one observer wrote, “the amount of profanity launched forth against the guards would have completely annihilated them.”

  Much of this tirade was aimed at General Scott. It had no effect. He vowed that anyone who obstructed the count would be “lashed to the muzzle of a twelve-pounder and fired out of the window of the Capitol.” Scott would then “manure the hills of Arlington with the fragments of his body.”

  Concern about the count was real and had intensified as the day approached. The fact was, the electoral votes were vulnerable. These were paper certificates that had to be transported from the Senate to the House, where Vice President Breckinridge would certify the count and announce the result. “This was the critical day for the peace of the capital,” wrote New York diarist George Templeton Strong. “A foray of Virginia gents…could have done infinite mischief by destroying the legal evidence of Lincoln’s election.”

  Rep. Charles Francis Adams made it a point to attend the session. “I had never seen the ceremony before,” he wrote in his diary. “It is an imposing one, and yet it is the weak part of the constitution.” The founding fathers had offered no clear mechanism to manage a situation in which electoral votes were stolen or destroyed, he wrote. Still, the count went smoothly. “The proceeding occupied two hours, but it was conducted in profound tranquility, which relieves us all of a great weight.”

  This tranquility abruptly disappeared, however, when Vice President Breckinridge issued the long-awaited announcement: “Abraham Lincoln, of Illinois, having received a majority of the whole number of the electoral votes, is elected president of the United States, for four years, commencing on the fourth of March.”

  By this point quite a few unhappy people had managed to get inside the Capitol despite the Army’s vigilance. The galleries were packed, according to diarist Adams; members of the Peace Convention had flooded the House floor. Upon Breckinridge’s announcement, a burst of anger rose from within the chamber, with salvos of profanity launched at Winfield Scott, including such pearls as “Old dotard!” and “Free-state pimp!”

  Lincoln got the news in a telegram that reached him at four-thirty p.m. while he was still in Columbus, where he would spend the night. “The votes were counted peaceably,” the telegram read. “You are elected.” A correspondent for the New York World observed that Lincoln “read it with his usual equanimity. The dispatch caused much rejoicing among his friends.”

  But another, graver, threat loomed.

  * * *

  —

  As Lincoln’s journey advanced, reports from Pinkerton’s agents accumulated. The detective increasingly saw the threat to Lincoln as credible, or, as others would later claim, saw the value to himself of proclaiming it so. The Barnum of detective work, Pinkerton pursued his profession with the instincts of both a showman and a novelist, always aware of points of drama. His operatives were strictly limited to providing observations and were forbidden to talk to one another or to interpret what they saw. Only Pinkerton had that mandate. He cast himself as the intellectual center of his operation, the one who collected the various fragments of evidence and pieced them together to solve a crime. To allay any doubts that he was indeed the mastermind, he often wrote about his role or hired ghostwriters to do it for him. By the time of his death in 1884 at age sixty-four, he had published eighteen novels based loosely on his cases, among them The Somnambulist and the Detective and The Expressman and the Detective, and in so doing established himself as one of the most famous lawmen of all time.

  The danger in Baltimore seemed extreme enough that Pinkerton decided to alert Lincoln’s aides. He knew that one of Lincoln’s friends was a key member of his traveling entourage, a railroad lawyer named Norman Judd who had been one of Pinkerton’s early clients—“a chunky gentleman of about five feet five inches,” according to one Washington correspondent.

  Pinkerton sent Judd a tentative warning when Lincoln’s train passed through Cincinnati on February 13—so tentative, apparently, that Judd did not relay it to Lincoln. By Sunday, February 17, Pinkerton’s own observations and reports from his agents had convinced him that the plot to kill Lincoln was indeed real and that it would happen in Baltimore. He composed a letter in which he described his concerns, and then dispatched his lead female detective, Kate Warne, to New York to intercept Lincoln’s party and present the letter to Judd.

  Warne arrived in New York early on February 19 and traveled to the Astor House, Lincoln’s hotel, where she arrived at about four in the morning. She had a long wait: Lincoln’s train wouldn’t reach New York for another eleven hours.

  Lincoln

  The Time Will Come

  February 17–21

  On Sunday, Lincoln’s friend Orville Browning wrote to him with an appraisal of his proposed inaugural address. “When I read your inaugural at Indianapolis, I did so in very great haste, and my attention was more attracted to the clear, bold and forcible statement of principles which are just and true than to considerations of policy and expediency,” he wrote. But now after reading it again more carefully, one passage troubled him—a sentence that struck him as unduly aggressive: “All the power at my disposal will be used to reclaim the public property and places which have fallen; to hold, occupy, and possess these, and all other property and places belonging to the government, and to collect the duties on imports, but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion of any state.”

  Browning urged Lincoln to drop the part about reclaiming public property. Lincoln had already asserted the right to do so in his Indianapolis speech, but this was the inaugural address, a speech for the nation as a whole, in which every word would be dissected for clues as to how Lincoln’s administration would address the North-South divide. A vow to reclaim property would be “construed into a threat, or menace, and will be irritating even in the border states,” Browning wrote. He told Lincoln that in whatever conflict might lie ahead, it was “very important” that the secessionists be made to appear as the aggressors. “The first attempt that is made to furnish supplies or reinforcements to Sumter,” he wrote, “will induce aggression by South Carolina, and then the government will stand justified, before the entire country, in repelling that aggression.”

  Browning later would offer Lincoln another telling observation: “The time is not yet, but it will come when it will be necessary for you to march an army into the South and proclaim freedom to the slaves.”

  Lincoln adopted Browning’s suggestion. He also made a note on the back of the letter’s last page, a whisper of a sentiment Lincoln would later incorporate in his address: “Americans, all, we are not enemies, but friends—We have sacred ties of affection which, though strained by passions, let us hope can never be broken.”

  * * *

  —

  Lincoln found large crowds at every stop, no matter what the weather. In one city, a man gave him an apple, which prompted a small but savvy boy to shout, “Mr. Lincoln! That man is running for postmaster!” Everyone laughed, including Lincoln. Even this boy understood that Lincoln was now being dogged at every stop by swarms of people seeking patronage jobs in the new administration. The character and size of his retinue changed dramatically from city to city. His cars took on office seekers the way his locomotive took on water. At Girard, Ohio, Horace Greeley himself climbed aboard bearing his familiar red-and-blue traveling blanket, and accompanied Lincoln for a short leg of his journey. As testimony to the fast-changing character of the age, at least one of Lincoln’s trains reached sixty miles an hour.

  Lincoln veered east to Albany, where a certain well-respected actor was onstage performing in a play called The Apostate. The actor, John Wilkes Booth, threw himself so energetically into his role that at one point he fell on his character’s dagger and carved open a three-inch wound. So well known was Booth as a “tragedian” that the incident made news as far away as Montgomery, Alabama.

  The entourage reached New York City the next day, Tuesday, February 19. The streets outside the Astor House were unusually quiet because all buses and carriages had been shunted to other streets. Among the many who witnessed Lincoln’s arrival was poet Walt Whitman.

  “Presently two or three shabby black barouches”—carriages with two large rear wheels, two smaller in front, and two rows of seats facing each other—“made their way with some difficulty through the crowd, and drew up at the Astor House entrance,” Whitman wrote. “A tall figure stepp’d out of the center of the barouches, paused leisurely on the sidewalk, look’d up at the dark granite walls and looming architecture of the grand old hotel—then, after a relieving stretch of arms and legs, turn’d round for over a minute to slowly and good-humoredly scan the appearance of the vast and silent crowds.”

  Whitman’s perch afforded him “a capital view of it all and especially of Mr. Lincoln: his looks and gait; his perfect composure and coolness; his unusual and uncouth height; his dress of complete black, stovepipe hat pushed back on his head; dark-brown complexion; seamed and wrinkled yet canny-looking face; black, bushy head of hair; disproportionately long neck; and his hands held behind, as he stood observing the people.”

  * * *

  —

  As Lincoln made his way toward the hotel, Kate Warne, Pinkerton’s chief female detective, also got a first look at the president-elect and registered a different impression. In her report she described him as looking “very pale and fatigued.” That evening, she sent a note to Lincoln aide Norman Judd by way of a hotel messenger, urging him to meet her in her room.

  Judd complied. “I followed the servant to one of the upper rooms of the hotel,” he wrote, “where, upon entering, I found a lady seated at a table with some papers before her.”

  He read Pinkerton’s letter. Inexplicably, Judd also kept this one to himself, possibly out of the conviction that it was just one more false threat, like so many others Lincoln had received since his election.

  * * *

  —

  During one of the many receptions arranged for Lincoln in New York, he met P. T. Barnum, the famed showman, who repeatedly invited him to visit his American Museum. Never one to miss a marketing opportunity, Barnum placed an advertisement on the front page of the New York World inviting New Yorkers to come to the museum and use its windows and balconies to observe Lincoln’s departure from the city. “Remember, this is the last chance in New York,” the ad bellowed. “Come early and get a good place.” While there, visitors “at no extra charge” could take in the museum’s exhibits, including “The Great Lincoln Turkey,” a forty-pounder allegedly to be presented to Lincoln on Inauguration Day; a giant two-thousand-pound bear named Samson; two “living Aztec children”; an albino family from Madagascar; a “man monkey”; thirty living “monster snakes”; a $150 speckled brook trout; and perhaps that most novel of phenomena, “The Living Happy Family.” Lincoln didn’t go, but his wife and sons did, with the exception of Tad, who demurred on grounds that he had no need to see any more bears; there were “plenty of bears” back home. That night Lincoln took in a popular opera, Un Ballo in Maschera, A Masked Ball, by Giuseppe Verdi, set improbably in seventeenth-century Massachusetts, and featuring the assassination of the “governor of Boston.” Lincoln did not stay for the climactic murder.

  He left for Philadelphia at nine o’clock Thursday morning, February 21, the day before George Washington’s birthday. Along the way he stopped in Trenton, the first of a number of moments scheduled to create an allusive link between the nation’s first president and its next. Here he addressed the secession crisis head-on. “I fear we shall have to put the foot down firmly,” he told his spellbound audience of state legislators; he then raised and lowered his own foot. It was a “quick, but not violent gesture,” according to John Hay. The audience roared approval and kept on roaring. “It was some minutes before Mr. Lincoln was able to proceed,” Hay wrote.

  When Lincoln arrived in Philadelphia that afternoon, he was met by a crowd estimated by the Philadelphia Daily News at “not less than a quarter of a million people” watched over by 550 city police officers, everyone chilled by a brisk westerly wind. Now and then snow fell. He did not expect to give a formal address but found himself compelled to speak anyway, and delivered the most important speech of his journey, one that whispered a theme soon to be clarified in blood.

  First, however, he received disturbing news.

  Washington and Philadelphia

  Dual Warning

  February 21

  In Washington, Gen. Winfield Scott, who had received Dorothea Dix’s warning as relayed by railroad executive Samuel Felton, heard further talk of a potential assassination and launched his own investigation.

  The general recruited expert help: the head of the New York City police department, John A. Kennedy, who had recently achieved notoriety for authorizing the seizure in New York Harbor of a shipment of muskets bound for Georgia. Of his own volition, Kennedy had already sent three of his detectives to Washington to investigate threats to the city and to the peaceful transfer of power; now he resolved to go himself “to look over the field.”

  General Scott offered Kennedy an aide from his own staff and gave him a choice between two accomplished officers, Col. Charles P. Stone and another colonel named Robert E. Lee. “I don’t know what induced me to select” Stone, Kennedy said later, “but I did so, and told him of my three detectives in the city and their findings.” After a four-year hiatus from the U.S. Army, Stone had newly returned to military life at the request of General Scott, who appointed him inspector general of the District of Columbia Militia.

  Like Pinkerton before him, Kennedy also sent detectives into Southern cities. New York officers found themselves exploring the demimonde of Baltimore, Richmond, and Alexandria. In Baltimore a New York police detective named David S. Bookstaver posed as a music agent. Whether Bookstaver ever ran into Pinkerton or his operatives is unclear, but suddenly, it seems, the border South and Baltimore in particular were crawling with detectives, all hearing the same alarming chatter in hotels, bars, and billiard rooms. Bookstaver was so unsettled by what he heard that he took his concerns directly to Colonel Stone in Washington, who in turn passed them on to General Scott.

  Lincoln was now two days away from his arrival at Baltimore and his perilous transfer to the B&O line for the final run to Washington. On Thursday, February 21, General Scott met with William Henry Seward and described what the New York detectives and Colonel Stone had learned about the conspiracy now apparently maturing in Baltimore. Seward, too, grew concerned. He asked Scott to have Stone put his report in writing.

  Seward resolved to send a warning to Lincoln by the most secure messenger at hand: his own son, Frederick, thirty, soon to become his assistant secretary of state. Seward sent for him at once.

  “I was in the gallery of the Senate Chamber shortly after noon on Thursday,” Frederick wrote later, “when one of the pages touched my elbow, and told me that Senator Seward wished to see me immediately.” He found his father waiting in the building lobby. Seward handed Frederick a letter that he himself had just written to Lincoln, along with Colonel Stone’s report and a note from General Scott.

  “Whether this story is well founded or not,” Seward told his son, “Mr. Lincoln ought to know of it at once.” He saw no reason for doubt. “General Scott is impressed with the belief that the danger is real,” he told Frederick. “Colonel Stone has facilities for knowing, and is not apt to exaggerate.” Lincoln needed to see these documents as soon as possible, Seward said. “I want you to go by the first train. Find Mr. Lincoln, wherever he is. Let no one else know your errand.”