From February 11-23, 1861, Abraham Lincoln journeyed by train from his home in Springfield, Illinois to Washington, DC, where he would be inaugurated as President of the United States on March 4. The journey was recounted in great detail ten years ago by the National Park Service, in “150th Anniversary of Lincoln’s Inaugural Journey,” and excerpts of Lincoln’s speeches at main stops on the journey give us a foretaste of his First Inaugural Address.
But recent events at the U.S. Capitol, and next week’s inauguration of Joseph R. Biden as our next President, reminded me of the last tense days of Lincoln’s journey, when he had to evade credible threats on his life. Also, events of 160 years ago are on my mind since I am publishing the letters of my 2nd-great-grandfather, written between 1861 and 1864 while he was serving in an Indiana regiment of the Union Army.
Here is my favorite account of the end of Lincoln’s journey, as told in The Civil War: A Narrative, by Shelby Foote. [1] It begins with Lincoln’s speech on the morning of February 22, 1861:
In Philadelphia, raising a flag at Independence Hall, he felt his breath quicken as he drew down on the halyard and saw the bright red and rippling blue of the bunting take the breeze. Turning to the crowd he touched a theme he would return to. “I have often inquired of myself what great principle or idea it was that kept this confederacy so long together. It was not the mere matter of the separation of the colonies from the mother land, but that something in the Declaration giving liberty, not alone to the people of this land, but hope to the world for all future time. It was that which gave promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance.” Men stood and listened with upturned faces, wanting fire for the tinder of their wrath, not ointment for their fears, and the music crept by them. It was not this they had come to hear.
So far Lincoln had seemed merely inadequate, inept, at worst a bumpkin, but now the trip was given a comic-opera finish, in which he was called to play the part not only of a fool but of a coward. Baltimore, the last scheduled stop before Washington, would mark his first entry into a slavery region as President-elect. The city had sent him no welcome message, as all the others had done, and apparently had made no official plans for receiving him or even observing his presence while he passed through. Unofficially, however, according to reports, there awaited him a reception quite different from any he had been given along the way. Bands of toughs, called Blood Tubs, roamed the streets, plotting his abduction or assassination. He would be stabbed or shot, or both; or he would be hustled aboard a boat and taken South, the ransom being southern independence. All this was no more than gossip until the night before the flag-raising ceremony in Philadelphia, when news came from reliable sources that much of it was fact. General Winfield Scott, head of the armed forces, wrote warnings; Senator Seward, slated for Secretary of State, sent his son with documentary evidence; and now came the railroad head with his detective, Allan Pinkerton, whose operatives had joined such Maryland bands, he said, and as members had taken deep and bloody oaths. Such threats and warnings had become familiar over the past three months, but hearing all this Lincoln was disturbed. The last thing he wanted just now was an “incident,” least of all one with himself as a corpse to be squabbled over. His friends urged him to cancel the schedule and leave for Washington immediately. Lincoln refused, but agreed that if, after he had spoken at Philadelphia the next morning and at Harrisburg in the afternoon, no Baltimore delegation came to welcome him to that city, he would by-pass it or go through unobserved.
Next afternoon, when no such group had come to meet him, he returned to his hotel, put on an overcoat, stuffed a soft wool hat into his pocket, and went to the railroad station. There he boarded a special car, accompanied only by his friend Ward Hill Lamon, known to be a good man in a fight. As the train pulled out, all telegraph wires out of Harrisburg were cut. When the travelers reached Philadelphia about 10 o’clock that night, Pinkerton was waiting. He put them aboard the Baltimore train; they had berths reserved by a female operative for her “invalid brother” and his companion. At 3:30 in the morning the sleeping-car was drawn through the quiet Baltimore streets to Camden Station. While they waited, Lincoln heard a drunk bawling “Dixie” on the quay. Lamon, with his bulging eyes and sad frontier mustache, sat clutching four pistols and two large knives. At last the car was picked up by a train from the west, and Lincoln stepped onto the Washington platform at 6 o’clock in the morning. “You can’t play that on me,” a man said, coming forward. Lamon drew back his fist. “Don’t strike him!” Lincoln cried, and caught his arm, recognizing Elihu Washburn, an Illinois congressman. They went to Willard’s Hotel for breakfast.
Reading this again reminded me that Elihu B. Washburne, who met Lincoln at the platform, was an ardent supporter of Ulysses S. Grant – who stood by the general through thick and thin, and was later Grant’s Secretary of State. One of the battles my ancestor took part in was Vicksburg, under the command of Grant; also commanding the Calvary of the 13th Corps at Vicksburg was Cadwallader C. Washburn, Elihu’s brother. After Vicksburg, Gen. Washburn led the invasion of the Texas Gulf Coast, in which my ancestor also took part.
[1] Shelby Foote, The Civil War: A Narrative, Volume One: Fort Sumter to Perryville (New York: Random House – Vintage Books, 1958 and 1986), pp. 36-37.