The Hour of Peril: The Secret Plot to Murder Lincoln Before the Civil War (13 page)

This ability to blend in with “men of evil intent” would make Pinkerton invaluable to Abraham Lincoln as he made his way to Washington in a climate of gathering danger. As a committed abolitionist, Pinkerton understood the challenges facing the incoming president as well as any man of his time. For all of that, when his path crossed with Lincoln’s in the days ahead, politics would be pushed aside. What Lincoln would need most at this defining moment was not a political partisan, but a cunning, hardheaded railroad detective.

Pinkerton might have drawn inspiration for the coming adventure from “Tam o’Shanter,” a favorite poem by the Scottish bard Robert Burns, which tells the tale of a wild journey through a dark night, beset by hostile spirits, ending finally in the safety of a river crossing. The poem was also a great favorite of Lincoln, who ranked the plowman poet alongside Shakespeare, and who was said to “quote Burns by the hour” in his Springfield law office. The previous year, on January 25, 1859, Lincoln had participated in a “Burns Night” celebration at Springfield’s concert hall, where he marked the centenary of the poet’s birth by proposing one of the evening’s toasts. “It is said,” one of Lincoln’s campaign biographies noted, “he now has by heart every line of his favorite poet.”

Pinkerton, too, had joined in the Burns celebrations that night, attending a parade through the streets of Chicago, followed by a hundred-gun salute. The evening finished with a gathering of three thousand people at the city’s Metropolitan Hall, with tributes from Mayor Haines and former governor McComas. According to one account, a highlight of the evening was the appearance of thirty-one-year-old Joan Pinkerton, who took the stage to lead the Highland Guard of Chicago in a heartfelt rendition of “A Man’s a Man for A’ That,” with its vision of a future in which all men are equals:

Then let us pray that come it may

(As come it will for a’ that)

That Sense and Worth o’er a’ the earth

Shall bear the gree an’ a’ that!

For a’ that, an’ a’ that,

It’s comin’ yet for a’ that,

That man to man the world o’er

Shall brithers be for a’ that.

Almost twenty years had passed since Pinkerton had first heard Joan Carfrae’s soprano voice in the back parlor of a Glasgow pub. He had come up in the world a great deal since then, but in many ways he was still the barefoot cooper who had marched on Newport for the rights of the workingman. Now, sitting with his sons, William and Robert, on one of his increasingly rare visits home, he listened as his wife’s voice filled the hall, singing of honest poverty and independent minds. After a moment, William and Robert heard an unfamiliar sound. Turning away from the stage, they saw that their father’s head was lowered and tears were streaming from his eyes.

PART TWO

PLUMS
and
NUTS

“If I alone must do it, I shall—Lincoln shall die in this city.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

A PIG-TAIL WHISTLE

In the day’s mail for Lincoln came letters cursing him for an ape and a baboon who had brought the country evil. He was buffoon and monster; an abortion, an idiot; they prayed he would be flogged, burned, hanged, tortured. Pen sketches of gallows and daggers arrived from “oath-bound brotherhoods.” Mrs. Lincoln saw unwrapped a painting on canvas, her husband with a rope around his neck, his feet chained, his body tarred and feathered.

—CARL SANDBURG,
Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years

ON CHRISTMAS DAY OF 1860,
a forty-nine-year-old sculptor named Thomas D. Jones stepped off a train at the Western Railroad Depot in Springfield. He wore a jaunty wide-brimmed hat and a flowing shawl tossed carelessly across his shoulders. In one hand he carried a cloth artist’s bag filled with knives, cutters, and trim tools, and in the other was a leather travel grip. Folded up in a pocket of his velvet frock coat was a commission to create a portrait bust of President-elect Lincoln, who at that moment was spending a final holiday at home with his family before heading to Washington. Jones had no guarantee that Lincoln would agree to pose, but as he took his bearings outside the small brick depot, he felt “a warming sense of optimism.”

The sculptor was just one of thousands of visitors trying to catch Lincoln’s ear during the hectic final days in Springfield. Ever since the election, Lincoln had been so besieged by people seeking political appointments and other favors—“groveling time-wasters, fawners, sycophants and parasites,” as one journalist described them—that he found it difficult to walk the streets. “Individuals, deputations, and delegations from all quarters pressed in upon him in a manner that might have killed a man of less robust constitution,” declared his friend Ward Hill Lamon. “The hotels of Springfield were filled with gentlemen who came with light baggage and heavy schemes. The party had never been in office: a clean sweep of the ‘ins’ was expected; and all the ‘outs’ were patriotically anxious to take the vacant places. It was a party that had never fed, and it was vigorously hungry.”

Jones, the sculptor, who had traveled through a heavy snowstorm to reach Springfield, was pleased with his first view of the town, recalling the “magical effect” of the falling snow as it mingled with steam from the arriving train. Others were less impressed. “None of the streets were paved, and in wet weather, of which a good deal prevailed during that winter, they were simply impassable,” noted Henry Villard in the
New York Herald.
“There was but one decent hotel.” Villard was being unkind; there were several well-regarded hotels and rooming houses within walking distance of the State House, along with a number of restaurants and saloons, and no fewer than three billiard halls. Still, as Villard remarked, the town was not accustomed to such crowds: “The influx of politicians is so great that a large number are nightly obliged to seek shelter in sleeping cars.”

Jones was fortunate to find a room available on the top floor of a serviceable hotel called the St. Nicholas, where he established a makeshift studio. The following day, rising at a “timely hour,” he strolled over to the State House in hopes of getting a moment with the president-elect, pausing briefly to take in the building’s impressive limestone facade and copper dome. Two years earlier, Lincoln had delivered his now-famous “House Divided” speech from this building. Now, at the invitation of the governor, Lincoln had moved his headquarters from the cramped law office he shared with William Herndon to a spacious reception room on the second floor. As Jones entered, he found the room buzzing with politicians and office seekers. To the artist’s surprise, Lincoln himself came forward with a word of greeting and invited him to take a seat. Jones was struck by the “hard and rugged lines” that creased Lincoln’s face, the stamp of his early life on the prairie, but noted that the president-elect’s features softened as he began to speak. “As he was a prompt man, he lost no time in proceeding to business,” the artist recalled, “and inquired how I made my busts.” A few months earlier, Lincoln explained, he had posed for a plaster cast of his face, an experience he had found “anything but agreeable.” Jones assured the president-elect that his method was different; he intended to execute various pencil sketches during a series of sittings, then craft a likeness from clay. “I like your mode,” Lincoln replied, and agreed to make himself available for an hour each morning at the St. Nicholas.

Lincoln had any number of reasons to consent to sit for Jones, but perhaps the most compelling was the chance to display his new beard, which he had begun growing only a few weeks earlier. The change of appearance was intended to mold a new image as he entered the White House, putting the seal on his transformation from prairie rail-splitter to judicious statesman. A popular piece of lore tells of a letter Lincoln received from eleven-year-old Grace Bedell, a girl in upstate New York, who advised him during the campaign that growing out his whiskers would likely tip her family’s support in his direction: “[Y]ou would look a great deal better for your face is so thin,” Miss Bedell reasoned. “All the ladies like whiskers and they would tease their husbands to vote for you and then you would be President.” The letter drew a prompt reply from Lincoln, who expressed regret that he had no daughters of his own to advise him on such matters. “As to the whiskers,” he said, “having never worn any, do you not think people would call it a piece of silly affect[ta]tion if I were to begin now?” In fact, Lincoln had been pondering the change for months. “It is allowed to be ugly in this world,” he remarked, “but not as ugly as I am.” The beard, he believed, would serve to “hide my horrible lantern jaws.”

Through the early weeks of January, the newly bearded president-elect dutifully trudged through muddy streets to the St. Nicholas, where he climbed four flights of stairs to the sculptor’s room for daily sittings. While Jones sketched, Lincoln reviewed his mail and composed replies. Every so often, Lincoln would hand Jones a pencil and ask him to sharpen it with one of his sculpting knives. The artist soon came to realize that their daily routine provided Lincoln with his “only retreat from the pursuit of the numerous applicants for office, where he could compose his addresses in peace.”

The peace would be short-lived. One day, an expressman clambered up the stairs with a small box addressed to Lincoln, wrapped in brown paper and loosely tied with string. “It was neither large nor formidable in appearance,” Jones recalled, “but it looked suspicious.” Jones at once offered to open the package himself, fearing that it might contain “an infernal machine or torpedo.” After some debate, Jones fastened on the plan of “placing it at the back of the clay model on which I was at work, using it as an earthwork, so in case it exploded, it would not harm either of us.”

One can only admire the sculptor’s bravery, but it is not entirely clear how much protection was to be afforded by a half-completed bust of Lincoln’s head. Nevertheless, Jones placed the parcel accordingly, then gingerly cut the strings with one of his sculpting knives. To the surprise of both men, “out tumbled a pig-tail whistle.”

Lincoln burst out laughing. A proverb of the day held that “One cannot make a whistle out of a pig’s tail,” but here was tangible evidence to the contrary. Given what lay ahead in Washington, the gift was a uniquely fitting token of luck, as Lincoln, too, faced a task widely held to be impossible. “Mr. Lincoln enjoyed the joke hugely,” recalled the reporter Henry Villard, who came upon the president-elect while he was trying earnestly to produce a few notes on this “masterpiece of ingenuity.”

Lincoln later acknowledged the “valuable present” with a note of thanks. “When I get to Washington,” he promised, “I will use it to call my cabinet together.”

*   *   *

JONES WOULD LATER
characterize the episode as an amusing distraction—“Neither did we soak it in a tub of water,” he said of the suspicious package, “or say many prayers over it”—but his initial concern was understandable. Even before the election returns were in, Lincoln’s postbag in Springfield contained at least a dozen pieces of hate mail each day. According to the
Washington Constitution,
Lincoln’s desk was piled high with threats of “flaying alive, assassination, mayhem, fire and brimstone, and getting his nose pulled.” Much of this unpleasant correspondence was the direct result of an ever-rising level of vitriol in the Southern press. Though Lincoln gave no sign that the attacks intimidated him, his friend Henry Clay Whitney felt revulsion. “There were threats of hanging him, burning him, decapitating him, flogging him, etc.,” Whitney recalled. “Nor had the limner’s art been neglected: in addition to several rude sketches of assassination, by various modes, a copy of
Harper’s Weekly
was among the collection, with a full length portrait of the president-elect; but some cheerful pro-slavery wag had added a gallows, a noose and a black-cap.”

One morning, after reviewing some particularly unpleasant letters in his third-floor law office, Lincoln scooped up an armful of offensive material and carried it down the steps to a cabinetmaker’s shop on the ground floor. Pausing in the doorway, Lincoln asked if he might borrow the proprietor’s stove to dispose of his burden. The cabinetmaker, who had taken a keen interest in his fellow tenant’s rise to the highest office in the land, asked if he might be allowed to keep the letters instead. Lincoln agreed.

These letters, and others like them, provide a chilling index of the passions stirred throughout the country: