* * *

  —

  In Washington, General Scott’s soldiers, now numbering close to seven hundred, watched the streets—all armed, some on horseback, others manning cannon placed in sensitive locations. The cannon in particular raised dark imaginings and heightened the atmosphere of impending danger. Not everyone approved. The one Southern member on the House Treason Committee proposed a resolution demanding the immediate removal of the troops. Buchanan refused. He replied that if he had not deployed these men and “evil consequences” had followed, “I should never have forgiven myself.”

  And then, that Friday night, an incident occurred that seemed to confirm the necessity of it all.

  A thirty-six-year-old Republican congressman from New York named Charles H. Van Wyck strolled through a dark neighborhood just north of the U.S. Capitol. This was not the Van Wyck for whom a particularly clogged New York expressway would one day be named; that honor would go to future mayor Robert Van Wyck, who at this moment was eleven years old.

  Van Wyck loathed slavery and was outspoken on the subject. The South still smarted from a speech he had delivered in March 1860 in which he had attacked slavery and the Democratic Party in lurid terms. He issued what to the Southern mind was an unforgivable slander: He called Southerners cowards. When published in the Congressional Globe, precursor to the Congressional Record, the speech ran to nearly eight full pages. It had not gone over well with Southern members of Congress. One, from Mississippi, called him a “scoundrel” and invited him to “go outside of the District of Columbia and test the question of personal courage with any southern man.”

  Newspapers around the country reported Van Wyck’s speech. Death threats followed. But Van Wyck was undeterred. On Friday, February 22, as Lincoln was making his way to Harrisburg, Van Wyck delivered another attack on slavery. That night, as on other nights, he traveled armed, with a pistol in his pocket.

  At about 11:30, three men approached. One came up beside him with a large bowie knife and stabbed him in the chest. The knife easily penetrated Van Wyck’s heavy overcoat, but the blade’s progress was impeded by a copy of the Globe folded several times over and “a pocket memorandum book of unusual thickness,” as the New-York Times reported. Otherwise, the Times judged, this first strike likely would have been fatal.

  But now Van Wyck leapt into action. As he struggled with the first attacker, another, also armed with a knife, tried to stab him. Van Wyck grabbed that blade with his left hand and knocked the assailant down with a single right-hand punch, then pulled out his gun and shot the first man, who fell to the ground. A third attacker stepped in and knocked Van Wyck unconscious.

  The men fled, undoubtedly afraid that Van Wyck would now draw from his coat a fully loaded cannon and full complement of cavalry. Van Wyck’s performance left the Times awestruck. “One man against three, attacked without any warning, in an unfrequented place, and in the shadow of a thick row of shade trees, and yet he managed to shoot one of his assailants, knock down another, and escaped with his life.”

  Van Wyck survived. Whether the attack was politically motivated was never determined, but it seemed to be one more marker of the nation’s descent toward violence. As the Times asked, “Is this the beginning of assassination of Republicans here for the exercise of free speech?”

  Washington

  The Man in the Felt Hat

  February 22–23

  Lincoln put on a worn overcoat and carried a hat of a kind he had never worn before, but which by now had become fashionable in America: a “kossuth” hat made of soft felt, with a low crown, named after Hungarian politician Lajos Kossuth de Udvard et Kossuthfalva, or Louis Kossuth for short, who had been exiled to America in 1851 after Russia invaded Hungary. His ardent support for democracy made him a popular figure in the 1850s; his hat, plumed with an ostrich feather, had become popular too. A variation of it became standard issue for the U.S. Army in 1858, but without the plume. Lincoln also carried a shawl, and walked with his shoulders slumped forward to disguise his height.

  The plan worked well. Incredibly, no one appeared to recognize Lincoln despite his great height, craggy features, and overall distinctive look. As a precaution the American Telegraph Co. agreed to temporarily sever all telegraph lines from Harrisburg “in all directions,” according to one planner’s account; the company’s superintendent was to dispatch “a professional Climber to do the needful thing in the right place and at the right time. I think we may safely rely that Harrisburg will be isolated completely.”

  Lincoln traveled through the night, stopping first in Philadelphia, where he, Ward Lamon, Pinkerton, and detective Kate Warne boarded the rearmost sleeping car of the night express to Baltimore, scheduled to leave at ten-fifty p.m. Warne had secured these berths by tipping the conductor; she claimed she needed them for “a sick friend and party.” By sheer coincidence New York City’s police superintendent, John Kennedy, occupied a berth at the front of the same car, having decided to go to Baltimore himself to provide personal assistance to Lincoln. Kennedy had no idea Lincoln was on his train, nor did Lincoln or Pinkerton know that Kennedy was aboard.

  Lincoln, to further disguise his presence and act the part of an ailing friend, leaned on Pinkerton’s arm and walked with an exaggerated stoop.

  Soon after leaving Philadelphia, the train entered Delaware, the first slave state of Lincoln’s inaugural journey; then came Maryland, the second. He reached Baltimore at three-thirty in the morning on Saturday, February 23. His sleeping car was dragged without hazard through the empty streets of the city and attached to his final train. Kate Warne left the group here and checked into a hotel. She filed her report, closing with, “Mr. Lincoln is very homely, and so very tall that he could not lay straight in his berth.”

  The train left Baltimore at four-fifteen a.m. Two hours later, bodyguard Ward Lamon caught a first glimpse of the incomplete dome of the U.S. Capitol.

  This was Lincoln’s triumphant arrival: an empty railroad station, before dawn, in disguise, at just about the same time that his originally planned train would be leaving Harrisburg with his wife and sons aboard.

  The depot wasn’t entirely empty, however. As Pinkerton told it, the three men—Lincoln, Lamon, and he—had just stepped off the train when a shadowy male figure emerged from behind a pillar and looked sharply at Lincoln. “Abe,” the man said, “you can’t play that on me.” He rushed forward.

  Pinkerton, alarmed, blocked him. “I hit the gentleman a punch with my elbow as he was close to me, staggering him back, but he recovered himself, and again took hold of Mr. Lincoln remarking that he knew him. I was beginning to think that we were discovered, and that we might have to fight, and drew back clenching my fist, and raising it to take the gentleman a blow, when Mr. Lincoln took hold of my arm saying, ‘Don’t strike him Allan, don’t strike him—that is my friend Washburne—don’t you know him?’ ”

  This was Rep. Elihu Washburne, one of only two men in Washington who had been alerted to Lincoln’s new arrival time. The other was Senator Seward, who was not present in the station.

  Washburne’s own account was rather less dramatic—and perhaps more accurate. “I planted myself behind one of the pillars in the old Washington and Baltimore depot where I could see and not be observed,” he wrote. “Presently the train came rumbling in on time. I saw every car emptied and there was no Mr. Lincoln. I was well-nigh in despair and about to leave when I saw slowly emerge from the last sleeping car, three persons.” One of these was a tall man wearing “a low-crowned hat, a muffler around his neck, and a short bob-tailed overcoat,” which imparted to him the look of a “well-to-do farmer.”

  Washburne immediately saw through the disguise. He stepped forward. “How are you, Lincoln?” he said.

  This did startle Lincoln and his companions, but, as Washburne put it, Lincoln “relieved them at once by remarking in his peculiar voice, ‘This is only Washburne!’ ”

  They headed for the exit and a carriage that Washburne had arranged.

  According to Washburne, Seward overslept and missed the arrival. Pinkerton, in a report dated that day, agreed that Seward was not at the station. But Seward claimed otherwise—or at least that’s what he told his wife in a letter later that day.

  * * *

  —

  Washburne took Lincoln to the Willard Hotel, located on Pennsylvania Avenue just steps from the White House. They entered through the “Lady’s Entrance” and were met by one of the Willard brothers, according to Pinkerton. It was only now that Seward arrived, by Washburne’s recollection, “much out of breath and somewhat chagrined to think he had not been up in season to be at the depot.”

  Seward would not allow himself to miss future opportunities. Just as Lincoln needed Seward’s allegiance, so Seward tried at every turn to seduce Lincoln into hearing his counsels and following his will, much to the annoyance of Lincoln’s wife, Mary, who called him “that hypocrite Seward” and a “dirty abolition sneak.” His fellow cabinet members, like Navy Secretary Gideon Welles, chafed at Seward’s growing connection to Lincoln. Seward, Welles wrote in his diary, “spent a considerable portion of every day with the President, instructing him, relating interesting details of occurrences in the Senate, and inculcating his political party notions.” He loved to be thought of as “premier,” Welles wrote; he “runs to the President two or three times a day,—gets his ear, gives him his tongue, makes himself interesting and artfully contrives to dispose of many measures, or give them direction independent of his associates.”

  Seward waged his campaign of influence across all fronts, shamelessly, even once buying kittens for Lincoln’s sons, Willie and Tad, knowing how much Lincoln adored the boys and kittens too; soon he would begin taking Lincoln along with him on late-afternoon carriage rides through the city, ostensibly just to take in the evening sights.

  But always underneath his obliging exterior ran a current of resentment—that it was Lincoln, not he, who occupied the White House, which was visible from his own house, a three-story rental on Lafayette Square. “I am a chief reduced to a subordinate position,” Seward wrote to his wife, “and surrounded with a guard, to see that I do not do too much for my country, lest some advantage may revert indirectly to my own fame.”

  When told on one occasion that his failure to offer a prominent Republican a foreign posting would cause widespread disappointment, Seward could hold back no longer. “Disappointment!” he snapped. “You speak to me of disappointment. To me, who was justly entitled to the Republican nomination for the presidency, and who had to stand aside and see it given to a little Illinois lawyer. You speak to me of disappointment!”

  That he referred to the six-foot-four Lincoln as “little” can only be seen as a measure of the intensity of his irritation.

  * * *

  —

  By now, the Willard, built by brothers Joseph and Henry Willard, had become the social hub of the city. The hotel, observed Nathaniel Hawthorne, “could more justly be called the center of Washington and the Union than either the Capitol, the White House, or the State Department.” Getting to this point had been a struggle for the Willards, however, until their hotel was selected in 1859 to host an eighteen-hundred-guest sendoff for Britain’s ambassador to America, Lord Napier, and then, in May 1860, to lodge a delegation of seventy-seven emissaries from notoriously insular Japan, who arrived for a three-week stay to deliver a ceremonial copy of a history-making trade agreement with America. “We began to doubt whether we were not on another planet,” one of the Japanese guests said, upon seeing Americans dance. They were mystified, too, by American religion. “The principal object of their worship,” wrote another Japanese guest, “is a naked man of about forty nailed through the hands and feet to a cross, and whose side is pierced.”

  First Lincoln was given room 13 on the second floor; he soon transferred to parlor suite 6, also on the second floor, but far more spacious and luxurious, with two bedrooms, two parlors, and a bathroom, as well as views of Pennsylvania Avenue and his future home. Originally he and his family were booked by the inaugural “Committee on Arrangements” to stay at the National Hotel, at Pennsylvania Avenue and Eighth Street, two and a half miles from the White House. Mary balked. The National had been the site five years earlier of a lethal outbreak of ptomaine poisoning caused by fecal matter in food and water. It had seriously sickened James Buchanan (then America’s minister to Britain) and killed his nephew and Harriet Lane’s brother. It left Buchanan so haunted by nausea and diarrhea that he feared he might collapse during his 1857 inauguration; he stationed a doctor nearby ready with two trusted cure-alls, smelling salts and brandy. Mary Lincoln did not want to risk a repeat. The Willard, only a block from the White House, looked promising and was the hotel of choice for Republicans, but was fully booked with Peace Convention delegates—until the Arrangements Committee persuaded one of them, William E. Dodge of New York, to give up his prime second-floor suite, number 6, for the president’s use.

  Apparently the hotel managed to find a room for Pinkerton, who also checked in, and, after a bath and breakfast, sent telegrams to Norman Judd and to others who had assisted in getting Lincoln safely to Washington. Pinkerton’s coded communications were no longer necessary, but, always with an eye for drama, he encrypted the last message anyway: “Plums has Nuts—arr’d at Barley—all right.”

  Plums was Pinkerton;

  Barley was Washington;

  and Nuts, for whatever reason, was Lincoln.

  In all, Lincoln had traveled nearly two thousand miles and given over one hundred speeches, all without incident, a remarkable thing given the accumulating rumors of impending violence and the fact that he had traveled with only minimal security—all that way, only to arrive at his new hometown in secret and disguise. It was a mistake, he realized. Just how big a mistake would soon become painfully apparent.

  * * *

  —

  On that Saturday of Lincoln’s arrival, one more state fled the Union. Texas voters overwhelmingly approved secession, by a vote of 46,129 to 14,697, thereby bringing the total of seceded states to seven, or roughly one-fifth of the country.

  A week earlier, facing a minimal threat from a mob of civilians and ragtag militia, the general in charge of U.S. Army forces in Texas, Georgia-born David E. Twiggs, seventy-one years old, had surrendered all federal outposts in the state to the Confederacy, including the fabled Alamo, along with their stockpiles of weapons, in the process cutting adrift twenty-four hundred federal soldiers, or about 15 percent of the existing United States Army. Buchanan fired him for “treachery to the flag of his country.”

  But Twiggs quickly found another employer: the Confederate States Army, which made him a brigadier general.

  Washington

  A Rumor of Plaid

  February 23

  Lincoln’s secret arrival transfixed Washington. A correspondent for the New-York Times gushed, “The whole city has been agreeably surprised by the coup d’état of the President elect, who transported himself as if by the wand of an enchanter, from Philadelphia to Washington, without having been seen or even dreamed of.”

  An article on the paper’s front page the next day, Monday, February 25, embedded an indelible image in the national imagination when it stated that Lincoln “wore a Scotch plaid cap and a very long military cloak, so that he was entirely unrecognizable.” Cartoonists, blessing the day, added a kilt; one depicted Lincoln with the now requisite Scotch cap peering from a freight car in wide-eyed terror at a cat in full hiss. Harper’s Weekly titled a four-part cartoon “The Flight of Abraham,” with Lincoln demonstrating courage in the first panel but then bolting in panic toward Washington, wearing of course a tam-o’-shanter. The legend made its way into Mary Chesnut’s diary. “Lincoln flew through Baltimore, locked up in an express car,” she wrote. “He wore a Scotch cap.” In another entry, she derided his “noble entrance into the Government of a free people.”

  Columnists on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line skewered Lincoln, though the secessionist press tended to sneer rather than laugh. “Everybody here is disgusted at his cowardly and undignified entry,” reported the Charleston Mercury’s man in Washington. He accused Lincoln of exhibiting “the most wretched cowardice.” The proslavery New York Herald likened Lincoln’s arrival to that of a “thief in the night.” A number of newspapers observed that Lincoln’s journey was like a passage on the Underground Railroad, thereby conjuring in racist minds an image of Lincoln as a fugitive slave.

  All this underscored an inescapable truth, that at a time when Lincoln needed to appear as commanding as possible, he had slipped quietly into the capital of the country he was now expected to lead. Thoughtful observers found little to laugh at. A diarist identified only as “Public Man” wrote that “when we have reached a point at which an elected President of the United States consents to be smuggled through by night to the capital of the country, lest he should be murdered in one of the chief cities of the Union, who can blame the rest of the world for believing that we are a failure?” Another diarist, George Templeton Strong, warned that much rested on whether the assassination plot was real. “It’s to be hoped that the conspiracy can be proved beyond cavil,” he wrote. “If it cannot be made manifest and indisputable, this surreptitious nocturnal dodging or sneaking of the President-elect into his capital city, under cloud of night, will be used to damage his moral position and throw ridicule on his administration.”