The Hour of Peril: The Secret Plot to Murder Lincoln Before the Civil War (21 page)

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IN EXTRACTING EVEN THESE SMALL GLIMMERS
of information from Hillard, Davies had succeeded where an official government inquiry had failed. Hillard’s trip to Washington one week earlier had come in response to a summons to appear before an imposing congressional select committee. President Buchanan had reluctantly authorized the inquiry as a response to “alleged hostile organizations” operating within the District of Columbia, and their plans to attack the Capitol or disrupt the forthcoming inauguration. “It is said that serious apprehensions are, to some extent, entertained, in which I do not share, that the peace of this District may be disturbed before the 4
^th
of March,” declared the president in a characteristic display of fence-sitting. “In any event, it will be my duty to preserve it, and this duty shall be performed … and whatever the result may be, I shall carry to my grave the consciousness that I at least meant well for my country.”

While hardly a clarion call, the president’s concerns were sufficient for the purpose. The select committee was impaneled on January 9, 1861. From the first, the investigators approached their task with a certain anxious diffidence, paddling about on the surface of various rumors but never plunging to any depth. Over the course of five weeks the committee heard testimony from two dozen witnesses. The possibility of violence was raised several times but never pursued with any vigor, suggesting that the committee members were reluctant to fan the flames.

The witnesses ranged from concerned government officials such as Winfield Scott and James Berret, the mayor of Washington, to those believed to have knowledge of sinister designs, many of them hailing from Baltimore. Otis K. Hillard, one of the latter category, appeared before the committee on February 6. In spite of what he would tell Harry Davies one week later, Hillard testified under oath that he was “not a member of any military organization,” and he firmly denied any knowledge of plans to interfere with Lincoln’s inauguration. Hillard did tell the committee that he was aware, “altogether from hearsay,” of the doings of a formidable organization known as the National Volunteers. According to Hillard, this group, numbering some six thousand men, had sprung up in Baltimore to prevent “any armed body” from passing through Baltimore with Lincoln. Curiously, in Hillard’s construction of the events, the National Volunteers had no quarrel with Lincoln himself, only with the prospect of a military escort. “Mr. Lincoln will not be interrupted as a citizen alone,” he told the committee. “Individually, they have the greatest respect for Mr. Lincoln, and I think there would not be a solitary thing done, unless some military comes with him, which they look upon in the light of a threat.” Hillard went so far as to say that it made no difference whether these military men came from the North or the South; Baltimore would object in either case. Strangely, the committee sought little clarification on this point, but it instead asked repeatedly for the names of the leaders of the National Volunteers. Hillard declined for “prudential reasons” to give an answer, indicating that he did not wish to compromise his friends. When pressed, he gave a series of Bartleby-like refusals: “I would rather not answer that question,” he declared.

Astonishingly, the select committee accepted this rebuff without demur. Hillard was excused from further testimony, though the investigators reserved the right to recall him should it become necessary to compel him to answer. Though he had come through unscathed, Hillard returned to Baltimore feeling thoroughly rattled. In the circumstances, it is not surprising that he was reticent when the amiable Harry Davies popped up at his elbow a few days later.

As Davies chipped away at Hillard’s defenses in Baltimore, the select committee in Washington turned its attention to a bigger fish. As the secession debate in Maryland intensified, Thomas H. Hicks, the governor of the state, emerged as a central figure in the national crisis. In his inaugural address three years earlier, Hicks had attempted to claim the middle ground: “The people of this State yet know of no grievances for which disunion is a remedy,” he declared, “and they have always, in the words of Washington, discountenanced whatever might suggest even the slightest suspicion that Union can
, in any event,
be abandoned.” At the same time, however, the new governor insisted that the people of Maryland “will hearken to no suggestion inimical to the slaveholding States, for she herself is one of them.”

This balancing act, a political expedient in 1858, had become untenable after Lincoln’s election, with many of Hicks’s most powerful constituents clamoring for Maryland to withdraw from the Union. As the state legislature pushed Hicks to convene a special session—at which a vote on secession was expected—the governor engaged in a series of desperate stalling and blocking measures. This “sulphurous dithering” infuriated his colleagues and many of his constituents, but it won praise from the Northern press. “We know of no man who occupies a more prominent position at the present time than the Governor of the State of Maryland,” declared the February 16 issue of
Harper’s Weekly.
“To his wise and patriotic action, in firmly resisting the tide of partisan feeling in his State, he has so far averted civil war, and preserved Maryland as a nucleus about which, if politic counsels prevail, our glorious Union may be preserved.”

It is perhaps closer to the truth to say that Hicks was trying to gauge which way the wind was blowing. A slave owner himself, Hicks was fiercely committed to the preservation of what he called “southern ideals,” and he had recoiled at the election of Abraham Lincoln. A letter attributed to him at that time, quite possibly written in jest, offered a startling suggestion for a recently formed Maryland militia unit: “Will they be good men to send out to kill Lincoln and his men?” Whatever his private feelings may have been, however, he saw clearly that secession would bring disastrous consequences for his state. The previous December, after South Carolina announced its withdrawal, Hicks was told that Southern leaders were intent on “hurrying Maryland out of the Union,” so as to set the stage for a Southern takeover of Washington. “If this can be accomplished before the 4th of next March,” Hicks was informed, Southern forces would succeed in “divesting the North of the seat of Government.”

Hicks regarded the prospect with dread. At the beginning of January he issued a startling but little-heeded proclamation to the people of Maryland, stating that he had been warned “by persons having the opportunity to know” that secessionist power brokers in Washington intended to force Maryland to cast her lot with the cotton states. “They have resolved to seize the Federal capital and public archives, so that they may be in a position to be acknowledged by foreign governments,” he declared. “The assent of Maryland is necessary, as the District of Columbia would revert to her in case of a dissolution of the Union. The plan contemplates forcible opposition to Mr. Lincoln’s inauguration, and consequently civil war upon Maryland soil, and a transfer of its horrors from the States which are to provoke it.”

The nature of these horrors was clear enough. If a war was to be fought for control of Washington, Hicks knew, Maryland would likely be flattened in the process. On the other hand, if war was avoided, Maryland would be made to suffer the consequences if she declared for the South. Hicks continued to stall for time, hoping, as many others did, that a compromise would be reached before Lincoln took office. Publicly, he declared that the people of Maryland would not consent to secession “until every honorable, constitutional and lawful effort” had been exhausted.

As the calls for a special session of the legislature grew louder, Hicks tried desperately to hold his ground. “The people of Baltimore are all tired of waiting,” a witness told the select committee in Washington. “They believe that they have the right to speak upon this subject.” As the stonewalling dragged on, an angry group of National Volunteers attempted to batter down the door to the governor’s office.

Lincoln himself was well aware of Hicks’s dilemma. “The pressure there upon Hicks is fearful,” he was told by Alexander K. McClure, a Pennsylvania Republican. “Indeed, so embittered are the disunionists in Maryland that Gov. Hicks is seriously concerned for his personal safety. He has been advised that his assassination has been plotted, & is still entertained, in order to throw the government into the hands of the Speaker of the Senate, who is a ranting Secession disunionist.” The governor’s struggle, McClure believed, had serious implications for the president-elect. “If he should be compelled to yield,” he told Lincoln, “you could never get to Washington except within a circle of bayonets.”

At the height of Hicks’s standoff, a disturbing letter crossed his desk. Sent from Annapolis on February 7, it was written by George Stearns, an employee of Samuel Felton’s Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad, and concerned the passage of Lincoln’s train through Maryland:

Dear Sir

On Sunday last a man who said he was from Baltimore called on our Bridge tender at Back River and informed him an attempt would be made by parties from Baltimore and other places to burn the bridge just before the train should pass, which should have Mr. Lincoln on Board and in the excitement to assassinate him. The man who imparted this information will not give his name.

It is not known whether Hicks took any action or even made a reply to this remarkable warning. It is reasonably certain, however, that the letter was on the governor’s mind the following week, when he was compelled to testify before the select committee investigators in Washington. Hicks had come to Washington under duress. In the previous weeks, he had ignored repeated calls to appear—even when the committee offered to take his testimony in Annapolis—using the same dodges and feints with which he had confounded his own state legislature. On the morning of February 13, having exhausted every avenue of escape, Hicks was finally sworn in. The governor’s testimony proved to be a masterpiece of half-truths and contradictions. He admitted to having heard open declarations that “the installation of Lincoln and Hamlin would never come off,” but he insisted that he attached no great importance to such talk. When asked if he had knowledge of plans to attack Washington, he offered unsupported reassurances: “I have not; although I believe it was decidedly contemplated at one time … I think it was the settled determination some time ago to make an attack; but I do not believe there is the slightest danger of it now.” He declined to give the names of any men suspected in these plots, as it might, he said, “deprive me of sources of information which may be important hereafter.”

At one stage, Hicks briefly touched on darker concerns, only to dismiss them as unimportant:

Now I have letters going to show that there is a design contemplated to burn a particular bridge and to assassinate particular individuals. All this is to be done in the State of Maryland. But I attach no consequence to this information. I have no doubt these things are talked over, but by a set of men who, in my opinion, cannot organize a system that they can carry out. But that the matter is talked over in secret conclave, I have no doubt.

The select committee, anxious to move on to other business, somehow chose not to press the point. The official report notes only that “[a]fter further discussion, the question was overruled.” It is entirely possible that Governor Hicks believed, or wished to believe, the substance of his testimony before the committee. His own life had been threatened repeatedly during this period, which may well have inured him to warnings of this type. In omitting certain details, however, he had denied the investigators the opportunity to exercise their own judgment. Hicks freely admitted receiving letters that detailed plans for hostile acts against the government, but he pointedly refused to make them available. “If I believed for a moment that it would conduce to the public interest and safety, I would leave all this pile of letters with the committee,” he stated, “but I refrain from doing so, that, as one of the guardians at least of the public interest and safety, I may keep the way open hereafter for advice and information.” The William Stearns letter, with its unequivocal threat against Lincoln, would remain buried among the governor’s papers for years to come.

Governor Hicks would be the select committee’s final witness. To a large extent, his testimony had come too late to be of any practical use. One of the committee’s principal concerns had been to chase down the threat of “persons or hostile organizations” with designs to prevent the Electoral College from ratifying Lincoln’s election. By the time Hicks finally appeared, after several weeks of evasions, that mission had been rendered all but moot. The governor wrapped up his long-delayed testimony shortly before noon on February 13, 1861. The Electoral College was scheduled to convene later that same afternoon. If the investigators appeared to gloss over some of the governor’s more provocative statements, it had much to do with the fact that they had already formed their conclusions at this late date, and looked to Hicks for nothing more than an eleventh-hour confirmation. The select committee’s official report, released the following day, would state that the investigation had found no proof of “the existence of a secret organization here or elsewhere hostile to the government,” and foresaw no “interruption of any of the functions of government.”

By that time, Lincoln’s train was already under way.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE MAN AND THE HOUR

We have known Mr. Lincoln for many years; we have heard him speak upon a hundred different occasions; but we never saw him so profoundly affected, nor did he ever utter an address which seemed to us so full of simple and touching eloquence, so exactly adapted to the occasion, so worthy of the man and the hour.