The Hour of Peril: The Secret Plot to Murder Lincoln Before the Civil War (25 page)

Afterward, in his hotel room, Lincoln’s amusement turned to horror. In Springfield, he had carefully packed away the working draft of his inaugural address in a black oilcloth carpetbag, along with the text of several of the other speeches he intended to give on the journey to Washington. The bag had been entrusted to the care of Robert Lincoln, who, perhaps as a consequence of his close adherence to the refreshment car earlier in the day, had now lost track of it. Under close questioning, Robert admitted that he had handed the bag to a waiter during the melee in the dining room and that the waiter, in turn, had placed it on a pile of other baggage behind the hotel counter. “A look of stupefaction passed over the countenance of Mr. Lincoln,” recalled John Nicolay, who knew that the president-elect’s head was filling with visions of his inaugural address appearing prematurely in the next day’s newspapers, or perhaps lost forever. Without a word, Lincoln threw open the door of his room and forced his way along the corridor, which was still packed with well-wishers. Making his way to the hotel office, he swung himself over the baggage counter with “a single stride of his long legs” and fell upon a pile of black carpetbags that had accumulated there. Taking a small key from his pocket, he began snatching up bags one by one and testing the locks. A number of them opened to Lincoln’s key, with the result that several pints of whiskey, packs of playing cards, and spare shirt collars were exposed to view before Lincoln at last recovered his own bag. Robert received a “somewhat stern admonition,” and for the rest of the trip the bag remained in the hands of Lincoln himself.

While Robert Lincoln licked his wounds, Ward Lamon received a stern admonition of his own. The first day of the journey had exposed the president-elect to dangers no one had foreseen. As the evening drew to a close, some officials from Illinois, most of whom would return home the following day, took Lamon aside to express their concern. As Lamon recalled, the group pulled him into a hotel room and, locking the door, “proceeded in the most solemn and impressive manner to instruct me as to my duties as the special guardian of Mr. Lincoln’s person during the rest of his journey to Washington.” Jesse Dubois, a longtime friend who had served with Lincoln in the Illinois legislature, finished the remarks with an impressive vow: “We intrust the sacred life of Mr. Lincoln to your keeping; and if you don’t protect it, never return to Illinois, for we will murder you on sight.” Lamon recognized this as “an amiable threat, delivered in a jocular tone,” but he acknowledged that it arose from a “feeling of deep, ill-disguised alarm for the safety of the President-elect.” Only after Lamon had promised to protect Lincoln at all costs was the door unlocked so that the party from Illinois could take their leave. “If I had been remiss in my duty toward Mr. Lincoln during that memorable journey,” Lamon declared, “I have no doubt those sturdy men would have made good some part of their threat.”

*   *   *

IN BALTIMORE, ALLAN PINKERTON
was hearing threats that were considerably less amiable. As the Lincoln party made its way east—possibly that same night—Pinkerton was meeting face-to-face with Cypriano Ferrandini, the man who, according to James Luckett, had vowed that the president-elect would not survive his passage through Baltimore.

Pinkerton had a couple of hours to fill before his appointment at Barr’s Saloon. He spent a few moments jotting down notes on his meeting with Luckett, then turned to the reports he had received from his agents in the field. Kate Warne, posing as Mrs. Barley of Alabama, had been able to engage a number of the “prominent ladies of Baltimore” in conversation over the news of the Confederate convention in Montgomery. As a result, she heard many vague rumblings about sympathetic doings in Maryland. Pinkerton felt sure that she would soon uncover something more substantial, if given sufficient time.

Timothy Webster and Hattie Lawton, posing as a married couple among the railroad workers of Perrymansville, had also made promising strides. In a remarkably short time, Webster had managed to gain the “entire confidence” of the members of the tightly knit community, whose suspicions of the stranger in their midst had been lulled to a great extent by the presence of his beautiful young wife. A single man might well be a Northern spy, but Webster, posing as a newly married man in search of work, had been able to mingle freely, and was “generally looked upon as a man who could be trusted.” Soon after his arrival, Webster learned of a local militia unit with anti-Union leanings. “In twenty-four hours thereafter he had enrolled himself as a member of the company,” Pinkerton noted, “and was recognized as a hail fellow among his rebel associates.”

As the evening shadows fell across his desk, Pinkerton locked his files away in a drawer and stepped around the corner to Barr’s Saloon to keep his appointment with Luckett. Entering quietly, he spent several moments studying the scene before moving forward to join his friend. Luckett was standing at the bar, along with several other men, engaged in animated conversation. At the center of the group was the man Pinkerton knew to be Ferrandini. Pinkerton had glimpsed him once or twice in his barbershop, but Ferrandini seemed a different, altogether more commanding presence in this setting. The others turned to him for approval each time they spoke, and hung on his responses with expressions of reverence. “All seemed to regard him as an important personage,” Pinkerton noted, “and one who was eventually to perform giant service in the cause.”

After a moment, Pinkerton stepped toward the bar and called out a greeting to Luckett, who came forward to present him to Ferrandini. “Luckett introduced me as a resident of Georgia, who was an earnest worker in the cause of secession,” Pinkerton recalled, “and whose sympathy and discretion could be implicitly relied upon.” In a lowered voice, Luckett reminded Ferrandini of Mr. Hutchinson’s generous twenty-five-dollar donation. As the two men shook hands, Pinkerton sized Ferrandini up, as he often did in such situations, in terms of his ethnic heritage. “He shows the Italian in I think a very marked degree,” Pinkerton said, “and although excited, yet was cooler than what I had believed was the general characteristic of Italians.”

Pinkerton may have worried that Ferrandini would be cautious about speaking freely in the presence an outsider, but Luckett’s endorsement had the desired effect. Ferrandini seemed to warm to the detective immediately. After ordering drinks and cigars, the group withdrew to a quiet corner of the saloon, where the conversation turned swiftly to politics. Within moments, Pinkerton noted, his new acquaintance was expressing himself in terms of high treason. “The South must rule,” Ferrandini insisted. He and his fellow Southerners had been “outraged in their rights by the election of Lincoln, and freely justified resorting to any means to prevent Lincoln from taking his seat.”

Pinkerton and his team had heard similar sentiments expressed many times since their arrival in Baltimore, but Pinkerton found he could not dismiss Ferrandini as just another crackpot. “As he spoke his eyes fairly glared and glistened,” the detective wrote, “and his whole frame quivered, but he was fully conscious of all he was doing.” Pinkerton noted the steel in his voice, and the easy command of the men clustered about him, and recognized that this potent blend of fiery rhetoric and icy resolve made Ferrandini a dangerous adversary. “He is a man well calculated for controlling and directing the ardent minded,” the detective admitted. “Even I myself felt the influence of this man’s strange power, and wrong though I knew him to be, I felt strangely unable to keep my mind balanced against him.”

As Ferrandini held forth, he kept an appraising eye on Pinkerton, apparently measuring his responses to what was being said. At last, when he appeared satisfied that Pinkerton was in earnest, the conversation edged toward the crucial information that Luckett had hinted at earlier in the day: the possibility of an attempt on Lincoln’s life. Ferrandini and his men, Pinkerton would recall, spoke as if the matter had already been settled.

“Are there no other means of saving the South except by assassination?” Ferrandini was asked. He paused, as if weighing the question. “No,” he replied. “Never, never shall Lincoln be president. He must die—and die he shall. If necessary, we will die together.”

Another man spoke up. “There seems to be no other way, and while bloodshed is to be regretted, it will be done in a noble cause.”

Ferrandini’s eyes filled with approval. “Yes, the cause is a noble one, and on that day every captain will prove himself a hero. With the first shot the chief traitor, Lincoln, will die, then all Maryland will be with us, and the South will be forever free.”

Even as he listened to these incendiary words, Pinkerton realized that he still had no proof of what Ferrandini planned. Gathering himself, he addressed a question to Ferrandini that was intended to draw out the particulars. “But have all the plans been matured, and are there no fears of failure?” he asked. “A misstep in so important a direction would be fatal to the South and ought to be well considered.”

The answer shed no light on the situation: “Our plans are fully arranged and they cannot fail. We shall show the North that we fear them not.”

Before Pinkerton could speak again, a fresh problem arose. As Ferrandini held forth, a pair of strangers appeared in the saloon and took seats close by. Luckett immediately became suspicious and called Ferrandini’s attention to the newcomers, suggesting that they might be eavesdropping. Ferrandini decided to be cautious. He led his followers up to the bar, where a fresh round of drinks was purchased at Pinkerton’s expense, and then settled the group in a different corner of the room, waiting to see if the strangers followed. “Whether by accident or design, they again got near us,” Pinkerton reported. By now, Ferrandini’s suspicions were fully roused. He concluded that the two men must be spying on him, and he refused to say anything more on the subject of Lincoln’s visit to Baltimore. For Pinkerton, this was the very worst piece of luck possible. He tried in vain to guide the conversation back to its original channel, but Ferrandini refused to say anything more.

At length, Ferrandini rose to leave, hinting that he had a secret meeting to attend elsewhere. Glancing at the two strangers, he expressed concern that he might be followed as he left the saloon. Once again, Pinkerton’s luck took a turn for the worse as Luckett volunteered that he and Pinkerton would stay behind to keep an eye on the newcomers. As it was now clear that Pinkerton would learn nothing more that evening, he contented himself with playing his role as convincingly as possible. “I assured Ferrandini that if they did attempt to follow him, that we would whip them,” Pinkerton said. He may well have wished to do so in any case.

Ferrandini and his followers left to attend the meeting, Pinkerton reported dolefully, “and anxious as I was to follow them myself, I was obliged to remain with Mr. Luckett to watch the strangers.” After about fifteen minutes, Luckett also rose to excuse himself, leaving Pinkerton alone at his post. Disappointed that he had not been able to trail Ferrandini to his secret gathering, Pinkerton made his way back to his hotel to compile notes on all that he had heard that night.

There was much to consider. At one stage, as Ferrandini became swept up in his own eloquence, he had insisted that his own life was of no consequence, and that he would gladly trade it for Lincoln’s—just as his hero, Felice Orsini, had given his life for Italy. This mention of the Italian revolutionary carried a particularly dark resonance under the circumstances. Three years earlier, in January 1858, Orsini had attempted to assassinate Napoléon III by means of three fulminate of mercury bombs hurled at the emperor’s imperial carriage. Eight people were killed and dozens injured in the blasts, but the emperor and empress escaped unhurt, thanks in part to the bulletproof construction of their carriage. Orsini soon fell into police hands and was executed two months later, becoming a hero in the eyes of Ferrandini, who now styled himself as a successor to the “much-honored martyr.”

Lincoln would not have use of a bulletproof carriage as he traveled from one train station to the next in Baltimore. If he followed the pattern set at the other stops on his inaugural journey, he would ride in an open conveyance, raising his tall form to a standing position at regular intervals to make himself more visible to the crowd. If Ferrandini intended to emulate Felice Orsini, Lincoln would make a far easier target than had Napoléon III.

“If Italy
truly
rises, she
must
conquer,” Orsini wrote in his autobiography, published the year before his death; “but to arrive at this end, men of
capacity
and
decision
must be at the head of the revolution;
practical
men, and not
dreamers;
men who are not
intriguers, ambitious,
or afraid of
death
 … Without this there is no hope of redemption.”

Orsini had sought redemption through political assassination. An uncomfortable echo could be heard in the words Ferrandini spoke to Pinkerton that night. “Murder of any kind,” he said, “is justifiable and right to save the rights of the Southern people.”

Later, he stated his conviction with an even more chilling clarity. “If I alone must do it, I shall,” he told Pinkerton. “Lincoln shall die in this city.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

A POSTPONED REBELLION

All governments have their crises. Our republic never escaped one more alarming than that of February 13th, 1861. It was the day appointed for the seizure of Washington. Preparations had been made; armed bodies of men had been enlisted and drilled, and many of them had reported in the city pursuant to orders. When the managers were compelled to postpone the rebellion, these recruits declined to accept the necessity or to put off the opening drama. They had assembled for a revolution with its natural consequences—booty and plunder.