The Hour of Peril: The Secret Plot to Murder Lincoln Before the Civil War (24 page)

Ward Hill Lamon, Lincoln’s “particular friend.”
Courtesy of the Library of Congress

Lincoln himself was otherwise engaged. Even before the train pulled away from the Springfield depot, Villard and the other reporters on board had pressed Lincoln for a transcript of his farewell remarks, even though he had been speaking off the cuff. Lincoln obliged, taking out a pad and pencil to record an “official” version of the speech, with the help of secretary John Nicolay. The resulting document, marked with blotches and slips of the pen caused by the lurching of the cars, was then handed over to the operator of the train’s portable telegraph. Lincoln’s comments would be widely circulated in the press, to a generally enthusiastic reception. “Thousands and tens of thousands read them with tearful eyes,” wrote one admirer.

Having completed this piece of business, Lincoln sat back to enjoy the ride in his private car at the rear of the train, gazing out the window at the crowds of well-wishers gathered for a glimpse of the train as it thundered past. “The enthusiasm all along the line was intense,” recalled Thomas Ross, the train’s brakeman on the first leg of the journey. “As we whirled through the country villages, we caught a cheer from the people and a glimpse of waving handkerchiefs and of hats tossed high into the air.”

“There were many way stations where the train halted for a few moments,” John Nicolay added. “At all these temporary halts there would be lusty cheering and unceasing calls for Mr. Lincoln.” Lincoln answered these calls time and time again—“wherever the iron horse stops to water himself,” as he described it—waving from the rear platform of the passenger car, bowing and doffing his hat to the ladies, and sometimes even stepping down from the train and wading into the throngs to shake hands. Later, when Mary Lincoln had come aboard the train, she would occasionally join her husband on the rear platform, her small stature in marked contrast to his towering height, to provide what he called “the long and the short of it.”

Amid all the cheering and flag-waving, Lincoln hoped to avoid giving speeches. On a few occasions, he was “bullied” into saying a few words, as the new secretary John Hay recalled, but he kept his comments as innocuous as possible. “It would of course be impossible for him to make speeches everywhere,” Hay explained, “and yet no sooner would he make his appearance on the rear platform of the car than calls for a speech would come out of every throat. The people wanted not only to look upon their President-elect, but to hear his voice.” Lincoln soon devised a ploy to extricate himself from these situations. He would wait until the train was already under steam before he made his appearance, “hat in hand,” leaving just enough time to bow in all directions before the train pulled away. Not all calls to speak were so easily turned aside. According to one source, the train was forced to make an unexpected stop outside of Decatur when eager supporters placed a section of rail fence across the track. An unflappable Lincoln stepped out to exchange greetings with the crowd while the train crew cleared away the obstruction.

Later, when concerns for Lincoln’s safety became a matter of public debate, there would be an attempt to recast this episode in a more sinister light. “An attempt was made … to wreck the train bearing the president-elect and suite, about one mile west of the State line,” the
New York Times
would report on February 26. The article went on to detail an Illinois railroad employee’s account of spotting an obstruction shortly before Lincoln’s train was due to arrive: “A machine for putting cars on the track had been fastened upon the rails in such a manner that if a train ran at full speed and struck it, the engine and cars must have been thrown off, and many persons killed.”

The story of Lincoln’s supposed narrow escape would be repeated and embroidered upon in the days to come. None of these later accounts made mention of the pilot engine that was supposed to be running ahead of the train to scout for irregularities, though it is possible that this extra precaution had not yet been put in place. In any case, no one on board Lincoln’s train made any mention of the episode at the time, and Ward Lamon would later dismiss the reports as nonsense. “It has been asserted that an attempt was made to throw the train off the track between Springfield and Indianapolis,” he would write. “None of the Presidential party ever heard of these murderous doings until they read of them in some of the more imaginative reports of their trip.”

At the time, the passengers and crew did not appear overly troubled by thoughts of danger. “I remember that, after passing Bement, we crossed a trestle, and I was greatly interested to see a man standing there with a shotgun,” recalled Thomas Ross, the brakeman. “As the train passed he presented arms. I have often thought he was there, a volunteer, to see that the President’s train got over it in safety.” In fact, the gunman was likely a member of the Illinois state militia, who had been charged by Republican governor Richard Yates with the task of guarding the vulnerable bridge crossings.

Yates’s forces were able to stand down shortly after noon on February 11 as the Lincoln Special crossed the Indiana state line to a thirty-four-gun salute, one for each state of the Union—including the controversial Kansas Territory, which had been admitted as a free state only two weeks earlier. As the travelers enjoyed a quick lunch, the train cars were hitched to a fresh engine, which was capable of reaching speeds of up to thirty miles per hour—a breakneck pace for the time—on the straight track of the Toledo and Wabash line.

William Wood, settling into his role as superintendent of arrangements, was determined to keep to schedule in spite of the frequent stops, even at the risk of embarrassment to the president-elect. This became evident at a stop in Thorntown, outside of Lafayette, as Lincoln came to the rear platform as usual and apologized for declining to make a speech. By way of explanation, he launched into an anecdote concerning an aspiring politician who owned a sluggish but sure-footed horse. “The horse was so confoundedly slow, however,” he continued, but just at this moment—before Lincoln could deliver his punch line—the train lurched away from the depot, cutting him off in mid-sentence. At the next stop along the line, in Lebanon, Lincoln was informed that some of his supporters from Thorntown had chased after the train and were now literally “panting to hear the conclusion of the story.” Lincoln cheerfully took up where he had left off, explaining that he himself shared the dilemma of the owner of the plodding horse. If he stopped at every station to make a stump speech, he insisted, he would not arrive in Washington until the inauguration was over.

In that spirit, Lincoln would have been pleased to note the train’s on-time arrival in Indianapolis at 5:00 that evening, to another thirty-four-gun salute. It was here, however, that Superintendent Wood’s elaborate plans began to break down. As a large and boisterous crowd converged on the train, it became evident that Wood’s instructions to the Committee of Arrangements in Indianapolis had gone unheeded. No precautions had been taken to protect the president-elect from “insolent and rough curiosity,” reported Henry Villard. Instead, Lincoln “was almost overwhelmed by merciless throngs before he reached his hotel.” Colonel Ellsworth and Ward Lamon managed to bundle him into a waiting carriage, but the rest of the travelers were left to fend for themselves. Most, including Robert Lincoln, were obliged to walk from the station, carrying their own luggage.

Matters were no better at the Bates House, where Lincoln planned to spend the first night of his journey. The four-story brick hotel was besieged by “turbulent congregations of men,” wrote John Hay, “all of whom had too many elbows, too much curiosity, and a perfectly gushing desire to shake hands.” The entrances and stairways were so clogged with “immovable humanity,” said Villard, that Lincoln managed to get inside only by “wedging himself through in a determined manner.”

Once inside, Lincoln steeled himself for the first of the many “handshaking levees” he would endure on his journey, a seemingly endless receiving line of callers and local dignitaries. The process, as Hay described it, seldom varied: “The crowd came up one staircase, crossed the corridor bowing to Mr. Lincoln, and descended by another staircase to the street. Occasionally one of the sovereigns would address the President in an informal manner, eliciting always a prompt, sometimes a felicitous, repartee.” Almost all of the men who passed in front of Lincoln insisted on pumping his hand, with the result that his fingers were soon sore and swollen. According to Hay, he maintained his affable spirits throughout the ordeal: “From what I saw of the President’s coolness under the infliction of several thousand hand-shakings, I should say that he unites to the courage of Andrew Jackson the insensibility to physical suffering which is usually assigned to bronze statues.”

Be that as it may, the scenes at the train station and the hotel had exposed an unsettling truth. Lincoln’s traveling party, with its well-intentioned but disorganized cadre of friends acting as bodyguards, was simply not equipped to handle the sheer crush of people who wished to see, hear, and touch the president-elect as he made his way to Washington. Lamon and Ellsworth might well have been able to stand firm against a crowd of five or six, but not thousands. Even after the rest of the military adjuncts—Colonel Sumner, Major Hunter, and Captain Pope—rejoined the group in Indianapolis, there would be serious concerns about crowd control. Lincoln himself seemed inclined to entrust this matter to the reception committees of each town the train passed through, but his protectors were concerned that any large crowd—even a friendly one—could turn dangerous at any moment. The problem would grow worse in the days to come. “In the push and crush of these dense throngs of people, in this rushing of trains, clanging of bells, booming of guns, shouting and huzzas of individuals and crowds … a false step even might bring danger to life and limb under wheels of locomotives or carriages,” John Nicolay would write. In some instances the very officials who had invited Lincoln to stop would prove to be the most reckless in matters of safety. “These committees generally seemed consumed by a demon of impatience,” Nicolay observed. “They would sometimes tumble pell-mell into a car and almost drag Mr. Lincoln out before the train had even stopped, and habitually, after stoppage, before the proper police or military guards could be stationed around a depot or stopping place to secure necessary space and order for a comfortable open path to the waiting carriages.” In a letter to his fiancée, Nicolay was even more blunt: “It has been a serious task for us of his escort to prevent his being killed with kindness.”

Lincoln himself was not inclined to protest. As the incoming president, he believed he had an obligation to make himself accessible to the public. He had declined invitations to stay in private homes during the journey, where he would have had more privacy and a better chance of rest, and opted instead to stop in public lodgings where open receptions could be held. “The truth is, I suppose I am now public property,” he told Ward Lamon, “and a public inn is the place where people can have access to me.”

Lincoln also knew, after his long silence in Springfield, that he would not be able to limit his public pronouncements to cheery anecdotes about slow-moving horses. The public would expect to hear something of how he intended to address the secession crisis once he took office. Toward that end, he planned to deliver short addresses at most of the major stops along the way to the capital, giving a limited preview of the course his administration would pursue. In this way, the Lincoln Special would become something of a rolling laboratory, testing the themes and sentiments of his inaugural address in advance of March 4. Whenever possible, however, he would emphasize that matters were still in flux, and that he had not yet claimed the right to speak as the chief executive. As he would later tell a crowd in Buffalo, “[I]t is most proper I should wait and see the developments, and get all the light possible, so that when I do speak authoritatively, I may be as near right as possible.”

Accordingly, during a lull in the reception at the Bates House, Lincoln pulled himself away from the receiving line and stepped out onto the hotel’s balcony. A crowd of some twenty thousand people waited on the street below. The speech they heard is thought to have been composed earlier that day on board the train. If so, perhaps Lincoln’s exhaustion and sadness at leaving Springfield cast a shadow over the composition, which struck many listeners as strangely off-key. He began with a hairsplitting discussion of the exact meaning of the words
coercion
and
invasion,
with reference to the events at Fort Sumter, and went on to suggest that the secessionists had misunderstood the obligations of statehood: “In their view, the Union, as a family relation, would seem to be no regular marriage, but rather a sort of ‘free-love’ arrangement, to be maintained on what that sect calls passionate attraction.”

Though the crowd laughed heartily at this gibe, the comment would land with a thud in the press. Worse yet, after his earlier efforts to strike a conciliatory posture, Lincoln’s careful parsing of the terms of conflict sounded very much like a man sharpening his saber. Lincoln himself appeared to realize that he had said too much. He made some effort to backpedal, insisting that he simply wished to give the crowd something “to reflect upon.”

John Hay scrambled to cast the episode in a positive light, insisting that Lincoln’s remarks had met with universal approval and that shouts of “That’s the talk” and ‘We’ve got a President now” were heard from the crowd. Even so, the speech drew many denunciations, especially in the Southern press. The
Louisville Journal
accused the president-elect of “sporting with fire-balls in a powder magazine.” Lincoln would give two more speeches from the hotel balcony before leaving Indianapolis, both of which contained elements designed to soften the message of the first.

Matters went downhill for the rest of the evening. After the long day of travel, Lincoln hoped to enjoy a quiet meal with his inner circle. William Wood’s instructions to the reception committee had called for a private dining room, but, as Lincoln now discovered, the request had been ignored. In the absence of a quieter venue, Lincoln entered the hotel restaurant, where he took in the chaotic scene, with waiters handing out plates of food seemingly at random, without regard to what had been ordered. Lincoln looked on as one man who had asked for tea was given a pickle, and another had a bowl of sugar poured down his back. Hay noted that the spectacle “seemed to amuse the President quite as highly as the gentlemen, whose perception of the fun of the thing was sharpened by getting nothing whatever to eat.”