The Hour of Peril: The Secret Plot to Murder Lincoln Before the Civil War (22 page)

—EDWARD L. BAKER, editor of the
Illinois State Journal

JUST BEFORE 7:30 ON THE MORNING
of Monday, February 11, 1861, Abraham Lincoln ducked into the office of the Chenery House, the hotel in Springfield where his family had spent the past three nights, and began knotting a hank of rope around his traveling cases. When the trunks were neatly bundled, he attached a series of hotel note cards and hastily scrawled an address: “A. Lincoln, White House, Washington, D.C.” This done, the president-elect stepped outside and climbed aboard a horse-drawn omnibus coach. The Lincoln Special was due to depart for Washington in half an hour’s time.

The weather had been frigid for several days, but there was a thaw in the air that morning. In spite of the early hour, the residents of Springfield were already stirring, eager to pay their respects. As Lincoln made his way toward the Great Western depot on the east side of town, a group of well-wishers trailed along behind, growing larger as it wound through the streets. Arriving at the depot, Lincoln was surprised to find an enormous throng of supporters waiting to see him off—“almost all of whom,” he later said, “I could recognize.” The boys in the crowd let loose with a chorus of cheers at his arrival.

Stepping down from the omnibus, Lincoln gazed out over the crowd. “His face was pale, and quivered with emotion,” declared journalist Henry Villard, “so deep as to render him unable to utter a single word.” The bulky Ward Lamon and the diminutive Colonel Ellsworth appeared suddenly at Lincoln’s side, stepping smoothly into their bodyguard roles. Gripping the president-elect lightly by the elbows, they led him into the small brick depot building, where friends and neighbors were waiting to say their good-byes. As he made his way through the small waiting room, Lincoln paused every few steps to grasp hands and exchange a few words.

Lincoln also said a brief farewell to his wife at the depot. With her porcelain skin and glossy auburn hair, Mary Todd Lincoln had been a striking beauty in her youth—“one who could make a bishop forget his prayers,” said one admirer. Now, though thickened with age, Mrs. Lincoln could still captivate a roomful of callers. Behind her back, however, there were whispers about her anxious, stormy disposition. She had, a cousin remarked, “an emotional temperament much like an April day.”

It had been decided that Mrs. Lincoln would not be on board as her husband’s train left Springfield, a last-minute change of plan ascribed to a preinaugural shopping trip in St. Louis. The announcement had prompted unwelcome speculation to the effect that Mrs. Lincoln was afraid to make the journey, owing to the “many vapory rumors” of an assassination attempt. According to one account, Mrs. Lincoln had considered remaining behind with her two younger sons until the Lincoln Special arrived safely in Washington, but she was persuaded otherwise by a telegram from Winfield Scott. The general warned that her absence would draw much comment, as it “might be regarded as proceeding from an apprehension of danger to the President.” Instead, it was decided that she, along with Tad and Willie Lincoln, would skip only the first leg of the journey, joining the train in Indianapolis the following day. Writing in the
New York Herald,
Henry Villard gave a gentle polish to Mrs. Lincoln’s change of plan:

A number of lady friends of Mrs. Lincoln have, with characteristic solicitude, taken up the newspaper rumors of intended attacks upon the President-elect while on his way to the Federal capital, and used them as arguments to induce her to delay her removal to Washington until her husband was safely installed in the White House. But the plucky wife of the President met all these well meant propositions with scorn, and made the spirited declaration before she started on her Eastern trip that she would see Mr. Lincoln on to Washington, danger or no danger.

Privately, Villard was glad to be rid of her, however briefly. In a memoir written many years later, he lambasted Mrs. Lincoln as greedy and utterly lacking in propriety, and accused her of accepting gifts for “the use of her influence with her husband” in securing political appointments. Villard claimed that Mrs. Lincoln had nearly delayed her husband’s departure that morning, throwing herself on the floor “in a sort of hysterical fit” until he yielded to yet another of her demands.

Whatever may have transpired privately, the Lincolns gave a convincingly affectionate show of parting at the depot. This done, William S. Wood, the self-styled superintendent of arrangements, stepped forward. Eager to keep to schedule, Wood led the president-elect toward the tracks, where a three-car train pulled by a gleaming Rogers steam-powered locomotive waited. It was only the first of several well-appointed trains upon which Lincoln would travel over the next two weeks, as each of the railroad companies transporting the president-elect vied to set new benchmarks for speed and comfort. Descriptions of the lavish trappings of the special cars—including walnut furniture, whale-oil lamps, and crystal flower vases—would become a regular feature of the coverage of the journey. On one segment of the trip, Lincoln would occupy a rolling stateroom with a large portrait of George Washington at one end and a likeness of himself opposite it. On another, Lincoln would recline on a splendid lounge “covered with a mazarine of dark blue cloth of fine texture, trimmed with tri-colored gimp braid and tassels.” The latest technology was also in evidence, including a portable telegraph machine, so that the president-elect’s party could send and receive messages en route.

The roster of friends and political worthies who would be joining Lincoln on the journey had been shuffled and revised up until the moment of departure. The newspapers estimated that “about fifteen persons” boarded the train that morning, along with a fair number of “special reporters for the leading newspapers.” One Lincoln intimate complained that the guest list was “very badly made up,” but another chose to make light of the situation, claiming that the train now carried representatives of all parties and political views, “with the exception of the secessionists.” Even so, there was little in the way of military trappings, as Lincoln had wished. Though Colonel Ellsworth, in his Zouave garb, hovered protectively at Lincoln’s side, the rest of the uniformed escorts were conspicuously absent. Colonel Sumner, Major Hunter, and Captain Pope had all been sent ahead to join the train in Indianapolis.

A great deal of press attention focused on seventeen-year-old Robert Lincoln, a Harvard freshman, whose striking good looks had drawn much attention from the young women of Springfield. A head shorter than his father, Bob had a smooth round face with dark, hooded blue eyes and the beginnings of a gallant mustache. In contrast to the rough-hewn image of his rail-splitter father, the younger Lincoln’s dapper polish inspired the newsmen to dub him the “Prince of Rails.” Also joining the Lincoln party was Mrs. Lincoln’s brother-in-law, William S. Wallace—“an elderly and amiable personage,” according to the
New York Times
—who was also the family doctor. A decade earlier, Dr. Wallace had tended to the Lincolns’s second son, Eddie, during the illness that claimed his life five weeks short of his fourth birthday. Ten months later, when the couple’s third son arrived, he had been named William Wallace Lincoln, in the doctor’s honor.

With so many seats on the train claimed by family and members of the press, only a limited number remained for the advisers and confidants who had received personal invitations from Lincoln himself, a group William Wood had designated as the president-elect’s “suite.” John Nicolay, Lincoln’s private secretary, was expected to be close at hand throughout the journey. Nicolay had pushed hard to find space for his best friend, twenty-two-year-old John Hay. An aspiring poet with wavy, unkempt hair and a quick, ingratiating smile, Hay had been admitted to the bar only one week earlier but had long since made himself indispensable as Nicolay’s assistant. Even so, Lincoln was reluctant to add Hay to the traveling party. “We can’t take all of Illinois with us down to Washington,” he is said to have remarked, though he soon relented: “Well, let Hay come.”

John Nicolay (seated) and John Hay, secretaries to Abraham Lincoln.
Courtesy of the Library of Congress

At the stroke of eight, the train bells sounded, signaling that it was time for departure. Mounting the steps of the passenger car, Lincoln turned to face the crowd from the rear platform. The previous day, he had remarked to the press that he did not plan to say anything “warranting their attention” to mark his departure. Now, humbled by the outpouring of support from his friends and neighbors, he bared his head and prepared to speak. As he did so, a ripple of movement passed through the crowd as hundreds of men removed their own hats. Lincoln paused to gather himself. “His own breast heaved with emotion,” reported James Conkling, a neighbor who was in the crowd that morning, “and he could scarcely command his feelings sufficiently to commence.”

At last he began to speak:

My friends, no one, not in my situation, can appreciate my feeling of sadness at this parting. To this place, and the kindness of these people, I owe everything. Here I have lived a quarter of a century, and have passed from a young to an old man. Here my children have been born, and one is buried. I now leave, not knowing when or whether I may return, to a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington. Without the assistance of that Divine Being who ever attended him, I cannot succeed. With that assistance, I cannot fail. Trusting in Him, who can go with me, and remain with you and be everywhere for good, let us confidently hope that all will yet be well. To His care commending you, as I hope in your prayers you will commend me, I bid you an affectionate farewell.

Speaking without notes or evident preparation, Lincoln somehow managed to capture in a few brief lines the full weight of his emotion at this fateful hour, and his resolve in the face of the task ahead. As Lincoln turned and stepped through the doorway of the train, the crowd burst into three rousing cheers. “Many eyes were filled to overflowing,” Conkling wrote, “as Mr. Lincoln uttered those few simple words. He is now fairly on his way for weal or woe of the nation.”

*   *   *

THAT SAME DAY, EVEN AS THE LINCOLN
Special gathered steam and pushed east toward Indianapolis, a second, oddly parallel journey was launched in Mississippi, some five hundred miles to the south. Climbing aboard a small boat rowed by slaves, Jefferson Davis took leave of Brierfield, his plantation home in Warren County, to catch a steamboat bound for Vicksburg. It was the first leg of a five-day journey to Montgomery, Alabama, where he had been selected as the provisional president of the newly formed Confederate States of America.

For Davis, a former United States senator and secretary of war under Franklin Pierce, it was a bitter turn of events. In Washington the previous month, upon being notified of his home state’s secession, Davis had delivered a solemn farewell address on the floor of the Senate. He sorely regretted, as he told his colleagues, that Mississippi’s secession had forced his resignation. Throughout his career, Davis held to a firm belief that each state had a sovereign right to secede, but he had also argued forcefully for the preservation of the Union. “I hope,” he told his colleagues from the North, “for peaceful relations with you, though we must part.… The reverse may bring disaster on every portion of the country.” Privately, he feared that armed conflict was now inevitable. It was, as he told a friend, “the saddest day of my life.”

Even as Lincoln and Davis set off on their separate journeys, there were many who believed that the secession crisis would yet be defused. One week earlier, on February 4, a widely publicized Peace Convention had convened at Willard’s Hotel in Washington. One hundred and thirty-two delegates from twenty-one states assembled under the gavel of former president John Tyler, a pro-slavery Virginian, to consider “some suitable adjustment” to the nation’s policies. It was by no means clear how this adjustment was to be reconciled with the platform upon which Lincoln had been elected. Some believed that the Peace Convention would buy time for the secessionist fervor to run its course. Others viewed the gathering as a calculated and even treasonous effort to undermine the incoming president. Lincoln himself anticipated “no good results,” though he expressed these doubts privately. In spite of the misgivings, the proceedings opened on a hopeful note. “What is party when compared to the task of rescuing one’s country from danger?” Tyler asked the delegates. “Do that, and one loud, long shout of joy and gladness will resound throughout the land.”

As it happened, few shouts of gladness were heard that day. Even as Tyler’s Peace Convention came to order in Washington, thirty-eight representatives of the six states that had seceded were convening in Montgomery to organize a provisional government—one that would “declare its independence of the late United States, as the Congress of the thirteen colonies declared their independence of Great Britain.”