The Hour of Peril: The Secret Plot to Murder Lincoln Before the Civil War (30 page)

After this calamitous scene, Lincoln and his traveling party were thankful that the following day—Sunday, February 17—had been set aside as a day of much-needed rest. Lincoln went to church twice that day, once in the company of Millard Fillmore, and later dined at the home of the former president. By all accounts Lincoln was grateful that the relatively light schedule gave him a chance to rest his speaking voice, which by this time had been worn to a ragged croak.

While Lincoln recuperated in Buffalo, the Peace Convention at Willard’s Hotel in Washington had also adjourned for the Sabbath. “We are getting along badly with our work of compromise—badly!” one discouraged delegate wrote to his wife. “Will break up, I apprehend, without anything being done. God will hold some men to a fearful responsibility. My heart is sick.”

While his fellow delegates rested, Lucius Chittenden turned his attention to the rumors drifting down to Washington from Maryland. Chittenden, the “independent committee of safety” member who had kept an anxious eye on the electoral count a few days earlier, had reason to believe that a fresh crisis was brewing. “Lincoln is to be assassinated—I know it,” he was told by a local journalist. “It is not even an independent plot; it is part of the conspiracy of secession.” On Sunday afternoon, Chittenden reported, a “duly authenticated” messenger arrived bearing a cryptic message from “reliable friends,” urging him to hurry at once to Baltimore. The reason for the summons, the messenger explained, would be revealed on arrival. “It was too important to be trusted to the mails or the telegraph,” Chittenden was told, “or even to be put upon paper.” Chittenden departed at once for Washington’s B&O Railroad Station, where he boarded a late train for Baltimore. As the train neared its destination, he recalled, “a stranger half-stumbled along the aisle of the dimly lighted car, partially fell over me, but grasped my hand as he recovered himself and apologized for his awkwardness.” As the man moved away, Chittenden realized that a piece of paper had been pressed into his hand. He withdrew into the passenger car’s “dressing-room” to read the note without being observed. “Be cautious,” it read. “At the station, follow a driver who will be shouting ‘Hotel Fountain,’ instead of ‘Fountain Hotel.’ Enter his carriage. He is reliable and has his directions.”

Chittenden followed the directions to the letter. Soon he found himself being driven to a private residence that he did not recognize, where a “true Republican”—whom he identified only as “Mr. H.”—stepped forward to greet him. “Our friend of the train came soon after,” he reported, whereupon he was led upstairs and introduced to half a dozen “reliable citizens of Baltimore.” “No time was wasted,” Chittenden continued. No sooner had the group assembled than the mysterious Mr. H. announced his reason for summoning Chittenden from Washington: “We want you to help us save Baltimore from disgrace, and President Lincoln from assassination.” Before the startled Chittenden could gather himself to respond, Mr. H. pressed on to explain that he and his colleagues had uncovered details of a credible threat to Lincoln but were unable to take measures to prevent it from being carried out. “We are watched and shadowed so that we cannot leave the city without exciting suspicion,” he explained. “We have sent messengers to leading Republicans in Washington, notifying them of the plot against the President’s life, but they will not credit the story, nor, so far as we can learn, take any action.” Worse yet, it appeared for the moment that Lincoln was determined to pass openly through Baltimore—even if “he loses his life in consequence.”

According to Mr. H., the details of the plan were chillingly clear. Within ten minutes of his arrival, Lincoln would be surrounded by a mob of “roughs and plug-uglies” who would murder him where he stood. “We have every detail of the plot,” Chittenden was told, “[and] we know the men who have been hired to kill him; we could lay our hands upon them to-night. But what are we to do if our friends will not believe our report?”

Chittenden was dubious. In spite of the many similar rumors he had heard in Washington, he had trouble accepting the existence of such an audacious scheme. “You call the plot a certainty,” he said. “What proof have you? Direct proof, I mean?” His hosts were prepared for this. Mr. H. explained that he had arranged for Chittenden to hear directly from one of the conspirators, an “unscrupulous character” who had now turned informant. Chittenden had qualms about accepting the testimony of such a man at face value, but he agreed to hear what he had to say. “Two men entered the room with the supposed assassin,” Chittenden reported. He noted that the informant “looked the character,” and went on to give a description that would not have been out of place in one of the lurid “penny dreadfuls” of the day: “He represented a genus of the human family seen in pictures of Italian bandits. His square, bull-dog jaws, ferret-like eyes, furtively looking out from holes under a low brow, covered with a coarse mat of black hair; a dark face, every line of which was hard, and an impudent swagger in his carriage, sufficiently advertised him as a low, cowardly villain.”

Speaking in the halting, heavily accented English of a recent immigrant, the informant described how he had come to be swept up in the plot. “A bad president was coming,” he began, and when he took power he would “free the negroes and drive all the foreigners out of the country. The good Americans wanted him killed.” The instrument of this plot was to be a man known as “Ruscelli,” a barber who likened himself to the Italian revolutionary Felice Orsini, and who had gathered a group of like-minded men around him. These men, the informant went on to explain, had formed a plan that could not fail. If, as many believed, the railcar carrying Lincoln was to be uncoupled at the Calvert Street Station and pulled through the city by horses, Ruscelli and his men would create a sudden obstruction to block its progress. “When the President’s car stopped at the obstruction,” Chittenden was told, “the assassins were to follow their leader into the rear of the car [and] pass rapidly through it, each knifing the president.” They would then make their way out of the car and pass through the crowd to a rum shop at the harbor’s edge. Hurrying through to the rear of the shop, the assassins would climb aboard a waiting schooner for a quick getaway. For added cover, bombs and hand grenades would be set off to create general panic and confusion.

The informant went on to say that every stage of the plot had been carefully rehearsed to avoid mistakes or hesitation at the crucial moment. “The whole work,” Chittenden learned, “from arresting the car to the departure of the schooner, could be done in five or six minutes.” If, on the other hand, Lincoln left his train car at the Calvert Street Station and boarded an open carriage, the work of the assassins would be even simpler. Within five minutes, the carriage would be surrounded by “a crowd of rowdies,” who would “swoop down upon it like vultures [and] have ample time to tear him to pieces.”

Chittenden took a moment to reflect on this grim scenario as the “miscreant” was led away. Turning to the others in the darkened room, he asked why the information had not been taken to the authorities. Mr. H. and his colleagues shifted uncomfortably. Ruscelli and his men, they explained, were simply tools of a much larger cabal that stretched from “pot-house politicians of a low order” to an “admixture of men of a better class, some of them in the police.” It was thought that many of the city’s leading citizens were privy to the plot, having “argued themselves into the belief that this was a patriotic work which would prevent greater bloodshed and possible war.” These well-heeled supporters kept the conspirators abundantly supplied with money, while the city’s police force—“from superintendent to patrolmen”—looked the other way. “No,” Mr. H. insisted, summing up his frustrations, “we have done everything in our power!” Chittenden, he believed, was their last hope. “If the government itself will not interfere,” he concluded, “and if, as he declares he will, Mr. Lincoln insists on passing through Baltimore in an open way, on the train appointed, his murder is inevitable.” Chittenden agreed at once to carry the group’s concerns back to Washington, and to do all that he could to convince General Scott and others of the seriousness of the threat. He passed the rest of the night talking the matter over with the Baltimore group, until it was time to catch the early-morning train back to the capital.

*   *   *

MANY OF THE DETAILS OF CHITTENDEN’S ACCOUNT
are dubious and others are open to interpretation, but it seems probable that the ringleader he described as “Ruscelli” was, in fact, Cypriano Ferrandini, as it is unlikely—even in a city the size of Baltimore—that there were two Italian barbers invoking the name of Felice Orsini as a justification for murdering Lincoln. Chittenden would also assert that one member of the league of assassins was “an actor who recites passages from the tragedy of Julius Caesar,” raising the tantalizing specter of the noted Shakespearean actor John Wilkes Booth, a Maryland native who was known to patronize Barnum’s Hotel in Baltimore. Booth was performing in Albany that month, and may have been in the crowd as Lincoln passed through that city, but there is no evidence to place him in Baltimore during the inaugural journey. Lucius Chittenden, whose account was published many years after the events at Ford’s Theatre, and who was much inclined toward elaborate conspiracy theories, drew no connection to the notorious assassin.

Allan Pinkerton would note, however, that “a sample of the feeling” among the people of Baltimore could be found in the person of Otis K. Hillard, a theater devotee who missed few opportunities to quote a favorite line from Shakespeare’s play: “Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more.” As Pinkerton recounted, Hillard took solace in these words “when his conscience roused him to a contemplation of the awful crime” under consideration. The “young Lieutenant,” as Pinkerton called him, came to believe that Brutus’s struggle with the conflicting demands of honor and patriotism mirrored his own. The points in common between Chittenden’s story and Pinkerton’s—including the Orsini-inspired barber and the Shakespeare-quoting plotter—suggest that the two men were tangled in the same thread of conspiracy. If nothing else, Chittenden’s account would seem to confirm that Lincoln’s supporters in Baltimore harbored a deep mistrust of the authorities, suggesting that Pinkerton’s own suspicions toward Marshal Kane and his men were not entirely without foundation.

Chittenden’s interlude in Baltimore came just as Pinkerton’s own investigation was drawing near to the heart of Ferrandini’s plot. By Sunday, February 17, Pinkerton had “resolved upon prompt and decisive measures to discover the inward workings of the conspirators,” because he had only a few days remaining in which to act. The detective sent another report to Norman Judd, in Buffalo, advising him that “the evidence was accumulating,” then summoned his resourceful operative Harry Davies, whose efforts to draw further information from Otis Hillard had reached a frustrating impasse.

By piecing together various rumors and reports, Pinkerton had managed to form a working theory of Ferrandini’s plan. Though he did not know it at the time, the broad strokes were disturbingly similar to those reported by Lucius Chittenden. “A vast crowd would meet [Lincoln] at the Calvert Street depot,” Pinkerton stated. “Here it was arranged that but a small force of policemen should be stationed, and as the President arrived a disturbance would be created which would attract the attention of these guardians of the peace.” While the police rushed off to deal with this diversion, he continued, “it would be an easy task for a determined man to shoot the President, and, aided by his companions, succeed in making his escape.” All that remained now, Pinkerton believed, was to select the man who would “commit the fatal deed.” This was to be determined by a drawing of ballots, “and as yet no one knew upon whom might devolve the bloody task.”

Pinkerton was convinced that Otis Hillard held the key to uncovering the final details of the plot, as well as the identity of the designated assassin. Hillard, he believed, was the weak link in Ferrandini’s chain of command. The grim realities of the plot were “preying heavily” on the young lieutenant’s mind, the detective noted, causing him to sink “still deeper into dissipation.” At such times, Hillard invariably turned to Harry Davies, whom he still believed to be an ardent secessionist. Davies’s sympathy and support, Pinkerton wrote, “had now become a necessity to him, and they were scarcely ever separated.” Though Hillard continued to dangle hints about Ferrandini and his band of conspirators at every opportunity, he had so far refused to take Davies fully into his confidence, claiming that he was bound by a solemn oath of secrecy.

Hillard appeared to regret keeping his friend in the dark. One afternoon, as Hillard appeared at Davies’s door, carrying a pair of “worked slippers” as a peace offering, the detective saw a chance to get Hillard talking. Davies accepted the gift readily enough, but his distracted, serious manner was calculated to put Hillard off balance.

“You look sober,” Hillard said, “what is the matter with you?”

Davies gave an answer designed to get Hillard talking. “I am thinking about what a damned pretty tumult this country is in,” he replied. “I have had all kinds of bad thoughts shoot through my mind.”

“What have you been thinking about?” Hillard asked.

Davies gave his answer as if unburdening himself of a difficult secret. If only a man had sufficient courage, he began, he might immortalize himself “by taking a knife and plunging it into Lincoln’s heart.” It was regrettable, he continued, that a man could not be found “with the pluck to do it.” Turning Hillard’s oft-quoted Shakespeare reference back on him, Davies bemoaned the fact that things were not as they were “in the time of Brutus and Caesar.” The men of the South, he said, lacked the courage of the noble Romans.

Hillard was dismayed by his friend’s words. “There
are
men who would do it!’ he insisted. Davies pretended to be skeptical: “I will give five hundred dollars to see the man who will do it,” he declared.

Hillard, rankled by the aspersions Davies had cast on Southern manhood, rose to the bait. “Give me an article of agreement,” he said, “and I will kill Lincoln between here and Havre de Grace.” Davies smiled to himself and offered his friend a drink. At last they were getting somewhere.