The Hour of Peril: The Secret Plot to Murder Lincoln Before the Civil War (49 page)

Soon, shots rang out. The exact sequence of events remains a matter of dispute, but within minutes the troops were taking fire—some of it from street level, some from the upper stories of surrounding buildings—and at least one soldier fell dead. The order to return fire was promptly given, though some of the soldiers could barely raise their weapons under the press of the crowd. “It was impossible for the troops to discriminate between the rioters and the by-standers,” wrote Mayor Brown. “The soldiers fired at will.”

According to several accounts, Mayor Brown and Marshal Kane made a valiant effort to contain the violence. Brown boldly waded through the mob to extend his hand to a Massachusetts officer, “exerting all his influence to preserve peace.” Kane also faced off with the rioters, placing himself in harm’s way, just as he had years earlier in Annapolis. “Keep back, men,” he shouted at the rioters, “or I shoot!” The maneuver “was gallantly executed,” reported Brown. “The mob recoiled like water from a rock.” In the end, however, these efforts proved futile. When the smoke cleared, as many as twenty-one people lay dead—both soldiers and civilians—with dozens of others badly injured. The death toll would likely have climbed higher if the troops had carried out a proposed counterattack from the Camden Street Station, but cooler heads prevailed. Instead, the soldiers departed as planned for Washington, where Lincoln himself was on hand to meet them. “Thank God you have come,” the president declared.

“But peace even for the day had not come,” Mayor Brown lamented. “It was manifest that no more troops, while the excitement lasted, could pass through without a bloody conflict. All citizens, no matter what were their political opinions, appeared to agree in this—the strongest friends of the Union as well as its foes.” Accordingly, a telegram was sent to Lincoln at the White House, signed by both Brown and Governor Thomas Hicks. “A collision between the citizens and the northern troops has taken place in Baltimore,” it read, “and the excitement is fearful. Send no more troops here. We will endeavor to prevent all bloodshed. A public meeting of citizens has been called, and the troops of the State and the city have been called out to preserve the peace. They will be enough.”

Before Lincoln could respond, however, Brown received word that more troops were, in fact, coming by rail from both Harrisburg and Philadelphia. In the absence of guidance from Washington, he and other city authorities now made an extraordinary decision: “[I]t was necessary to burn or disable the bridges on both railroads so far as was required to prevent the ingress of troops,” the mayor insisted. Later that night, two squads of men, including members of the police and the National Volunteers, set out from Baltimore armed with “picks, axes, crowbars and a good supply of turpentine.” Several railroad bridges were set alight and badly damaged, though none would be entirely destroyed, perhaps owing in part to Samuel Felton’s “nine-days wonder” of salt and alum whitewashing.

To the end of his life, Mayor Brown argued that this incendiary tactic had been calculated to preserve the peace—averting a second, perhaps even more violent confrontation by cutting off access to the city. It remains unclear whether Governor Hicks, who had become notorious for his vacillations and stalling tactics, approved the measure. Brown would attest that Hicks gave his assent under Brown’s own roof before removing himself to the relative safety of Annapolis, where he subsequently denied any part in the action. In either case, the following day word came from Washington that President Lincoln would send no more troops through the city for the time being. Mayor Brown himself went to the White House on April 21—two days after the bloodshed—and learned that Lincoln was seeking alternate routes through Maryland, circumventing Baltimore to avoid sparking further trouble. The president insisted, however, on the “irresistible necessity” of having clear passage through the state. “Our men are not moles, and can’t dig under the earth; they are not birds, and can’t fly through the air,” he told a subsequent delegation of Marylanders. “There is no way but to march across, and that they must do.”

Despite these efforts, the situation in Baltimore remained tense, and the calls for secession grew louder by the day. Chief among the agitators was Marshal Kane, whose heroics in the early hours of the crisis were soon overshadowed by a call for armed resistance to the passage of any further troops. “We will fight them,” Kane declared, “and whip them—or die.” Mayor Brown conceded that Kane’s pronouncement was “embarrassing in the highest degree to the city authorities,” but he defended Kane as a valuable officer of the peace who had simply been “carried away by the frenzy of the hour.”

Kane was not alone. “The war spirit raged throughout the city,” reported the
Baltimore American,
“with an ardor which seemed to gather fresh force each hour.” In the days to come, Lincoln would take a heavy hand in suppressing the secessionist element in order to keep Maryland in the Union and preserve the vital conduit to the North. By the end of the month, he would suspend the writ of habeas corpus along the route between Philadelphia and Washington, effectively allowing military authorities to make summary arrests of suspected Confederate sympathizers and detain them indefinitely. Critics judged the decision harshly, challenging it on both legal and moral grounds, but in some respects Lincoln had chosen a moderate path. At the time, Horace Greeley and others were calling for Baltimore to be put to the torch.

On the night of May 13, a violent thunderstorm rolled across the city, driving “all but the livestock” to shelter. When the city’s residents emerged under clearing skies the following morning, they were astonished to find a battery of heavy artillery pointing down from the heights of Federal Hill, overlooking the harbor and business district, and fortified by some one thousand Union soldiers. Gen. Benjamin Butler, having been dispatched to repair the damaged railroad routes and reopen the lines of communication, had now concentrated his forces on Baltimore. For Butler, a Massachusetts man, the action was a direct response to the previous month’s rioting. “I had promised my old comrades of the Sixth Regiment, with whom I had served for many years, that I would march them through Baltimore and revenge the cowardly attack made upon them,” Butler wrote. Mayor Brown was outraged at Butler’s audacity. “He immediately issued a proclamation,” Brown complained, “as if he were in a conquered city subject to military law.” In fact, Butler had acted without official sanction, and he was immediately stripped of command by an infuriated General Scott. Lincoln’s view may be judged by Butler’s subsequent elevation to the rank of major general, effective two days after the action on Federal Hill.

Authorized or not, Butler’s show of force had a profound effect. “In the days to come,” wrote Mayor Brown, “it became plain that no movement would be made towards secession.” Many of the city’s able-bodied men now went south to join the ranks of the Confederacy. For those who remained, the grip of martial law tightened. Within weeks, more than twenty members of Maryland’s state legislature, along with several Baltimore newspaper editors, were placed under arrest.

Among those rounded up and shipped off to federal prison forts were Mayor Brown and Marshal Kane. The mayor’s arrest came at the hands of a team of men led by none other than Allan Pinkerton, acting on orders from Secretary of War Simon Cameron. Brown recalled asking his accusers to produce a warrant, “but they had none.” Marshal Kane was shipped off to New York’s Fort Lafayette, where he protested to President Lincoln about the overcrowded conditions and “offensive and pestiferous” atmosphere. Kane had contracted a malarial fever en route to the prison, which added to the miseries of prison life. “Whilst suffering great agony from the promptings of nature and effects of my debility I am frequently kept for a long time at the door of my cell waiting for permission to go to the water-closet,” he told Lincoln, “owing to the utter indifference of some of my keepers to the ordinary demands of humanity.” Such treatment, he insisted, “cannot meet with the sanction of the President of the United States.”

Mayor Brown would remain stoic about the hardships he endured as a prisoner at Boston’s Fort Warren, but he had bitter words for the conduct of Governor Hicks, who managed to avoid arrest in spite of his “treasonable” actions in the previous months. The governor made a conspicuous, if belated, show of loyalty to the North, Brown wrote, so that he might “reap splendid rewards and high honors as the most patriotic and devoted Union man in Maryland.”

Not surprisingly, Brown also had harsh words for Lincoln. In the mayor’s view, much of this “dark and bitter” chapter of Baltimore’s history might have been avoided if Lincoln had simply kept to schedule two months earlier and passed through the city “in the light of day.” If Lincoln had set aside the advice of a certain “celebrated detective,” Brown suggested, the tide of ill feeling might have been turned. “If Mr. Lincoln had arrived in Baltimore at the time expected, and had spoken a few words to the people who had gathered to hear him,” Brown wrote, “he could not have failed to make a very different impression.” Instead, Lincoln had demonstrated a “want of confidence and respect,” thereby aggravating the city’s grievances. “On such an occasion as this even trifles are of importance, and this incident was not a trifle,” he insisted. “The emotional part of human nature is its strongest side and soonest leads to action. It was so with the people of Baltimore.”

Others felt differently. Lincoln’s allies and supporters saw the violence of April 19 as a forceful validation of his “midnight flight.” In a letter to Allan Pinkerton, Norman Judd declared that Lincoln would have faced the “same spirit that slaughtered the Massachusetts soldiers” if he had appeared openly in Baltimore two months earlier. Pinkerton himself would speak of the riot as the “crowning act of disloyalty,” and he decried the scenes of bloodshed as among the worst that had ever “blackened a page of American history.”

Both Pinkerton and Mayor Brown had ample reason to be passionate in their views, but neither man could pretend to be objective. It is naïve to suggest that had Lincoln followed through with his public program on February 23, a few well-wrought phrases would have sufficed to quell the growing turbulence in the city. By the same token, it is too much to say with certainty that there would have been outright carnage if he had made the attempt. A great deal had transpired in the interim between Lincoln’s passage and the fatal riot, not least of which was the bombardment of Fort Sumter. At the same time, many of Baltimore’s most rabid secessionists had been at pains to say—even before Lincoln left Springfield—that the flash point of any violence would not be the president-elect himself, but a hostile intent signaled by the presence of a “military escort.” As Otis K. Hillard had testified in Washington, he expected that Baltimore’s residents would receive Lincoln with respect—“unless some military comes with him, which they look upon in the light of a threat.” It is by no means clear that such reasoning would have withstood a trial by fire, but it is significant that so many in Baltimore had voiced objections to any display of armed force. Lincoln himself would likely have brushed aside such rationalizations and cut to the heart of the matter. “There is no grievance,” he had declared years earlier in Springfield, “that is a fit object for redress by mob law.”

Incredibly, while Mayor Brown and Marshal Kane were being rounded up, the “sinister Italian barber,” Cypriano Ferrandini, escaped punishment entirely. There is no record to suggest that Ferrandini, Otis Hillard, or any of their fellow conspirators was ever arrested or even questioned in the matter. In his memoirs, Pinkerton would gloss over this peculiar lapse: “A general sentiment of rage and disappointment pervaded the entire circle of conspirators and secessionists,” he wrote. “Finding that their plans had been discovered, and fearing that the vengeance of the government would overtake them, the leading conspirators had suddenly disappeared. All their courage and bravado was gone, and now, like the miserable cowards that they were, they had sought safety in flight.”

It is probably true that Ferrandini and the others fled the scene in the immediate aftermath of the drama. Some of them undoubtedly joined the forces of the Confederacy, and others may have simply vanished into new lives to escape arrest. If Ferrandini was among those who bolted, his absence was brief. Soon enough, he could be seen back in his shop at Barnum’s Hotel, razor and leather strop in hand, carrying on his work as Baltimore’s “best-known hair-dresser.” He remained there, a respected member of the community, for many years to come. The
Baltimore Sun
reported his death in December 1910, at the age of eighty-eight, under the headline
ADORNED CITY’S FAIREST.
Any involvement with the events of 1861 went unmentioned.

It has often been suggested that the absence of formal charges against Ferrandini and his men absolves them of blame, but this ignores the state of political turbulence that existed in Baltimore in the early months of 1861. If the conspirators were known to have fled the scene, it is unlikely that authorities would have pursued a formal investigation, given the urgencies of the moment. Lincoln would not have wanted to draw any further attention to a matter that had made him an object of scorn, especially at a time when he was struggling to keep Maryland in the Union. Even so, it is striking that Ferrandini should have been able to return to his comfortable life at Barnum’s without consequence, but he was not the only controversial figure to do so. Marshal Kane, who gave service to the Confederacy after his release from federal prison, would be elected mayor of Baltimore in 1877.

The riot of April 19 would cast a long shadow over the city, and foster lasting resentments. A Baltimore native named James Ryder Randall, who lost a close friend to the violence, gave voice to the divisive moment with a poem entitled “Maryland, My Maryland.” Randall’s sympathies were clear from the opening lines:

The despot’s heel is on thy shore,

Maryland!