Coming Fury, Volume 1 (37 page)

Lincoln was eleven days away from Springfield, and he had not yet got to Washington. If the purpose of this excessively roundabout trip had been to let the people of the North look at him, something of value had perhaps been accomplished; otherwise it would have been a good deal better if the trip had been made as short as possible, adorned by no speeches or rear-platform appearances. The physical strain had been immense; Newspaperman Henry Villard estimated that Lincoln had spoken at least fifty times during one week, and said that the man was almost exhausted by the time he got to Buffalo. The New York
Herald
’s man said that Lincoln seemed too “unwell and fatigued” to take part in conversation when his train left Albany, and he paid him a condescending tribute: Lincoln seemed “so sincere, so conscientious, so earnest, so simple hearted, that one
cannot help liking him,” but the only answer to the unending speculation about what he was going to do, as President, had to be the simple statement: “Lincoln does not know himself yet.” In the capital of the Southern Confederacy the Montgomery
Post
made propaganda out of its summing-up of Lincoln’s trip:

“The more we see and hear of his outgivings on his way to Washington, the more we are forced to the conclusion that he is not even a man of ordinary capacity. He assumes to be insensible of the difficulties before him—treats the most startling political questions with childish simplicity, and manifests much of the disposition of the mad fanatic who meets his fate—not in the spirit of respectful Christian resignation, but with the insane smile of derision upon his lips, as if unconscious of the destiny that awaits him. We may readily anticipate that such a man will be the pliant tool of ambitious demagogues, and that his administration will be used to subserve their wicked purposes.”
⁵

Yet there had been something extremely impressive about the journey, not because of anything that was said, but because of the intense, almost desperate press of the people who came to listen. David Davis, who traveled with Lincoln, wrote that the whole trip across Indiana and Ohio had been “an ovation such as has never before been witnessed in this country.” Wherever the train stopped there was a crowd, tense with excitement, and Davis believed that this was because of the times rather than the man. “I don’t think that it is Lincoln’s person or character that calls out the enthusiasm,” he wrote. “It must be, that the present state of the country calls forth such an enthusiasm as has never been witnessed.”
⁶

The unhappiest part of the whole trip came at the end. Here Lincoln found himself in an episode that wobbled uncertainly between low comedy and outright tragedy, a singular affair which is not entirely clear even now and which proves nothing except that the public mind was in an excessively disturbed condition.

At Philadelphia, just before the Independence Hall appearance, Lincoln and his closest advisers were warned—solemnly, and apparently on excellent authority—that he would be murdered if he passed through Baltimore as scheduled on the afternoon of Saturday, February 23.

The first warning was received by Norman B. Judd, the Chicagoan
who had been one of the Lincoln headquarters men at the Wigwam convention and who was now a member of the party traveling to Washington. To Judd, in his Philadelphia hotel room, at night, came two men with a tale to tell. One of the two was S. M. Felton, president of the Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Baltimore Railway, a sober man of business; and the other was the rising private detective Allan Pinkerton, who had a peculiar combination of energy and imagination—a combination that was taking him to the top of his chosen profession, but that would prove a decided handicap to the nation’s principal army before a year was out. Felton had hired Pinkerton to investigate rumors that secessionist sympathizers in Baltimore planned to break railroad communications with the capital; a matter of concern to Felton, since his own railroad was likely to be involved. Investigating, Pinkerton had unearthed an elaborate assassination plot, which hinged on the related facts that railway interchange facilities in Baltimore were imperfect and that the city was full of turbulent characters whose sympathies were notoriously Southern. A through car from the North bound for Washington must be switched in Baltimore from Felton’s railroad to the Baltimore & Ohio, and the transfer usually involved hauling the cars down a city street with horses. As Lincoln’s schedule stood, this would take place on a Saturday afternoon: Baltimore authorities had neither gone through the routine of inviting him to visit their city nor had they made any arrangements for police protection, and according to Pinkerton, Lincoln would be mobbed and killed while he was moving from one railroad station to another.

Judd, Felton, and Pinkerton therefore urged him to cut his trip short, cancel further appearances in Pennsylvania, and go to Washington secretly that very night.

This Lincoln refused to do. He had commitments to speak in Philadelphia and in Harrisburg the next day, February 22, and he would not try to get out of them. (Apparently he could not quite make himself believe in the reality of this assassination story anyway.) He did agree that after he had spoken in Harrisburg he would give the business further thought.

Further thought was thrust upon him. At Harrisburg he was visited by young Frederick Seward, son of the Senator from New York from whom Lincoln had taken the Republican nomination
and whom he had privately selected to be Secretary of State in his new cabinet. Frederick Seward brought impressive warnings from his father and from General Winfield Scott, both of whom had come upon the conspiracy story from sources independent of Pinkerton and both of whom believed that there definitely was substance to it. Like Judd and Felton, they were urging Lincoln to come down to Washington secretly so as to avoid the Saturday-afternoon transfer in Baltimore.
⁷

A serious plot to kill Abraham Lincoln may or may not have existed. (Four years later an equally frothy situation did in fact produce a John Wilkes Booth, complete with loaded derringer; it would develop eventually that in a time of civil war the most grotesque improbabilities can be built on ugly facts.) Washington had been full of ominous rumors all winter. The War Department had gone to great lengths to build up a thoroughly loyal home guard in the District of Columbia to prevent a seizure of power by secessionist sympathizers, and Winfield Scott had remarked that the general tension was such that “a dog-fight might cause the gutters of the capital to run with blood.” Just before Lincoln left Springfield, a citizen visited the old general to ask whether precautions had been taken to make sure that Congress could formally count the electoral vote; it was being rumored that a mob would rise and prevent it, thus (presumably) making it impossible for Lincoln to take office.

“I supposed I had suppressed that infamy,” said General Scott. “Has it been resuscitated? I have said that any man who attempted by force or unparliamentary disorder to obstruct or interfere with the lawful count of the electoral vote for President and Vice-President of the United States should be lashed to the muzzle of a twelve-pounder and fired out of a window of the Capitol. I would manure the hills of Arlington with the fragments of his body, were he a Senator or chief magistrate of my native state!” Subsiding a little, the general added: “While I command the army there will be no revolution in the city of Washington.”
⁸

Both Scott and Seward, in any case, believed in the reality of the assassination plot, and Lincoln was persuaded that he ought to be cautious. Elaborate arrangements were made, and on the night of February 22 Lincoln and his close friend Ward Lamon—a muscular
fighting-man type from the prairies, heavily armed with pistols and knives—quietly slipped away from the Harrisburg hotel, took a train to Philadelphia, changed there to a Washington sleeper, and got through Baltimore in the dead of night without incident. Lincoln wore a soft felt hat in place of his usual stiff topper, and Pinkerton accompanied the travelers and made certain security arrangements en route; and when the party reached Washington and Lincoln went to Willard’s Hotel, Pinkerton hurried to a telegraph office to send a wire in clumsy code to the people in Harrisburg: “Plums delivered nuts safely.” Whatever danger may have existed, it had been evaded. The long trip was over, and Lincoln had arrived at the capital city where he would spend the rest of his life.

This evasive action may have been necessary—may at least have
seemed
necessary, the state of the public mind being what it was—but it brought Lincoln much derision. There was something extremely undignified about a President-elect sneaking into Washington in the dead of night, and the uneasy drama of the trip from Illinois, bad enough at best, came to its end on this note of outlandish melodrama. (Why Pinkerton thought it necessary to send his plums-nuts wire is beyond explanation except that the man was an overgrown Tom Sawyer; once Lincoln had reached Washington, there was no earthly reason for mystery.) Lincoln’s act in wearing a soft hat was promptly magnified into the story that he had come into town disguised, garbed in a plaid Scotch cap and cloak, and the fact that this story could be printed and believed is simply another evidence that people were ready to believe anything at all: if Lincoln had encased his lanky six feet four in Scotch plaids, he would have been about as inconspicuous as the Washington Monument, an eye-catching target for the dullest of assassins. The whole trip had been mishandled, and the ending was the worst of all. The man on whom the nation’s fate was to depend had seemed to come to the capital like a clown.
⁹

But it was what he had been saying that disturbed thoughtful men. Charles Francis Adams, of Massachusetts, wrote of his misgivings in a letter to Richard Henry Dana, just before Lincoln arrived:

“As yet,” he said, “I can form no opinion of the character of
the Chief. His speeches have fallen like a wet blanket here. They put to flight all notions of greatness. But he may yet prove true and honest and energetic, which will cover a multitude of minor deficiencies.”
¹⁰

This was a winter when Americans began long journeys, moving from the West toward the East, from the known to the unknown, going separately and independently but somehow making part of one great, universal journey. Jefferson Davis had set off on his travels, and Abraham Lincoln had started his; and before either man reached his goal, Robert E. Lee also began to move, pulled east by the same force that was pulling the other two. For a brief time all three men were on the road at once, each of them deeply troubled in spirit, knowing that duty might require him to do hard and painful things which he would prefer not to do.

In a singular way, Lee began his journey more in the mood of Lincoln than in the mood of Davis. Davis had fewer doubts than either of the others. He knew, broadly, what he was supposed to do, and he knew how to set about it, and he neither knew nor cared what it might cost him. Lincoln and Lee took more doubts with them—doubts not only about the future but about the precise parts they themselves might have to play. Each man would say things, in the early stages of this journey, that he would not have said later. Each man would find the dimensions of the crisis enlarging as he came closer to it, his own probable role growing as the crisis grew; and each man would grow with the crisis itself, shaped by it but at the same time giving shape to it, becoming finally larger than life-size, a different man altogether than the one who began the journey.

As lieutenant colonel of the 2nd regular cavalry, Lee was stationed at Fort Mason, Texas. The commander of the Department of Texas, Brigadier General David Emanuel Twiggs, had passed along orders just received from the War Department: Lieutenant Colonel Lee was detached from his command and was to report to the general-in-chief, in Washington, for orders. On February 13
Lee put himself and his worldly goods in an army ambulance and set out on the first leg of the trip, heading for San Antonio, site of department headquarters.

Lee’s orders were slightly out of the ordinary. A regular reassignment to routine duty would call on him to simply report to the War Department and would not involve a personal call on Winfield Scott. It seemed probable that the general-in-chief had a special assignment for Lee, and this would almost certainly have something to do with the government’s military plans regarding the Southern Confederacy. Lee frankly told a brother officer that if this were the case he would resign. Under no circumstances could he draw his sword against Virginia and her sons. (He was assuming, obviously, that Virginia would eventually find herself in the Confederacy.) To another officer who asked bluntly what Lee proposed to do, he replied: “I shall never bear arms against the Union, but it may be necessary for me to carry a musket in defense of my native state, Virginia, in which case I shall not prove recreant to my duty.” How he could bear arms in Virginia’s defense without bearing arms against the Union was not clear, but the situation itself was not clear either. Earlier, Lee had coldly written that “secession is nothing but revolution,” but he had felt obliged to add that he saw no charms in “a Union that can only be maintained by swords and bayonets”; he apparently clung to a dim hope that he and his state could in some way manage to be neutral in the approaching conflict, and to an even dimmer hope that in the end there would be no war at all.
¹

This latter hope grew noticeably weaker before he even got out of Texas. If Virginia had not yet seceded, Texas had, and when Lee entered San Antonio, the revolution that he disliked so much was visible all over town in the form of marching men, excited crowds, and an unmistakable air of general hostility to the government of the United States. Lee discovered, in fact, that he might be a prisoner of war before he left San Antonio, even though no war existed. General Twiggs had surrendered his entire department to the recently seceded state of Texas.