The Hour of Peril: The Secret Plot to Murder Lincoln Before the Civil War (47 page)

Lincoln himself had promised to treat the matter as confidential, but as Pinkerton now discovered, Ward Lamon had other ideas. “After sending the dispatches I met Mr. Lamon,” Pinkerton recorded in his field report. “He was very much excited about the passage of Mr. Lincoln.” In fact, Lamon was preparing to telegraph a reporter in Chicago with the full details. Now that Lincoln was safe in Washington, Lamon “was determined to make a ‘splurge’ and have his name figure largely in it.”

Pinkerton was aghast. He had been annoyed ever since their paths crossed at the Continental Hotel two days earlier, when Lamon seemed to make a point of disregarding the detective’s alias. His irritation deepened during the carriage ride between stations in Philadelphia, with Lamon’s unseemly offer of weapons to Lincoln. Now, with this latest indiscretion, Lamon had gone too far. According to his field report, written later that day or the next, Pinkerton did his best to control his temper. “I endeavored to impress upon him that the arrival of Mr. Lincoln was yet considered secret,” the detective wrote, “and that nothing should be done by anyone to make it public until it had been considered by Mr. Lincoln and his advisers what shape his sudden arrival should assume.… I also reminded Mr. Lamon that whatever light this movement might be placed in, he must remember that I held Mr. Lincoln’s pledge that I should forever remain unknown as having anything whatever to do with it.”

Lamon would not be dissuaded. In his view, the fact that General Scott and Senator Seward had endorsed the measures taken in Baltimore removed the matter from Pinkerton’s sphere of influence. At this, Pinkerton’s anger boiled over. “All I could say appeared to be futile,” he recalled. “He talked so foolishly that I lost patience with him and set him down in my own mind as a brainless egotistical fool—and I still think so.”

Turning his back on Lamon, Pinkerton set off for a walk along Pennsylvania Avenue, letting off steam before he departed for Baltimore. When he returned to Willard’s Hotel about an hour later, however, he spotted Lamon deep in conversation with Simon Hanscom, a correspondent for the
New York Herald.
“I could plainly see that Lamon had been drinking,” Pinkerton said. Worse yet, it seemed as if the two men were talking about him. “I observed Hanscom look very hard at me,” the detective said, “and he kept his eye on me while I was around.” Soon, Hanscom pulled Lamon into the hotel bar. Pinkerton watched with mounting agitation as the reporter ordered drinks, “repeating the dose” several times as he began jotting notes. The conclusion was obvious: “Hanscom was ‘pumping’ Lamon.”

Finally, after watching for some moments, Pinkerton’s temper flared again. He caught Lamon’s eye and motioned him over. As Lamon approached, Pinkerton angrily tore into him for exposing his identity to the reporter. Lamon hedged, first telling Pinkerton that Hanscom already knew all there was to know, but finally acknowledging his indiscretion. “I got quite angry and swore some,” Pinkerton admitted. He reproached Lamon for being so careless under the influence of alcohol, and threatened to take the matter directly to Lincoln. The president-elect had given him a “pledge of secrecy,” the detective said, and would surely insist on “making Lamon hold his tongue.” The threat had an immediate effect: “Mr. Lamon was very much excited, and begged that I should not do this.” As a gesture of good faith, Lamon promised to speak with Hanscom at once to be certain that the detective’s name would be held in confidence. Seemingly chastened, Lamon turned away and hurried back to his seat at the bar.

Pinkerton did, in fact, go directly to Lincoln after this heated encounter, but there is no evidence that Lamon’s name was mentioned. “I sent a card signed ‘E. J. Allen’ to Mr. Lincoln, saying that I was about to leave for Baltimore and requesting to see him for a moment,” Pinkerton recalled. “I received an immediate reply asking me to come to his room.” Lincoln’s suite was filled with callers, including Seward and a delegation of congressmen, but the president-elect led Pinkerton to a quiet room, where he offered “warm expressions of thankfulness for the part I had performed in securing his safety.” Pinkerton told Lincoln that he would continue to monitor the situation in Baltimore, and that he expected to remain there until the inauguration. Lincoln asked to be kept informed of any fresh developments, and he promised once again that the detective’s “connection with the affair should be kept secret.” The two men shook hands as Pinkerton took his leave, setting off alone for Baltimore. So far as the president-elect was concerned, Pinkerton noted, “my object had been fully accomplished.”

*   *   *

IN PINKERTON’S MIND,
however, the job was far from over. He had not slept for more than a few hours for days on end, and no one would have begrudged him if he had waited until morning to leave Washington. But Pinkerton felt certain that the plotters would rise again, and that they might succeed this time unless he and his operatives resumed their efforts immediately.

The detective’s first act on arriving in Baltimore was to seek out James Luckett, his neighbor at the office building on South Street, who informed him that Ferrandini and his conspirators “would yet make the attempt to assassinate Lincoln.” There were no details as yet, Luckett continued, and there appeared to be a great deal of hard feeling among the plotters that they had been “cheated” by traitors in their midst. “[He] swore very hard against the damned spies who had betrayed them,” Pinkerton said, “remarking that they would yet find them out, and when found they should meet the fate which Lincoln had for the present escaped.”

Pinkerton felt relief that he and his agents were not suspected, but two of the New York detectives dispatched by Superintendent John Kennedy had not been so fortunate. As the events in Baltimore came to a boil, Thomas Sampson and Ely DeVoe found suddenly that they were under intense scrutiny. “It was no laughing matter,” Sampson would recall. “The ‘Volunteers’ were loud in their threats against traitors.… There was even a detail whose duty it was to ‘do away’ with suspected persons.” The two detectives took flight from the city in disguise, only managing to avoid discovery through the timely intervention of Timothy Webster. The Pinkerton operative had known Sampson years earlier in New York, and he became aware of his old friend’s peril just as a group of pursuers was closing in. “I swear to you,” Webster warned the New York officers, “there are twenty men after you this very instant.” In the end, Sampson and DeVoe were forced to make a “jump for life” from a moving train to complete their escape. Pinkerton claimed that he and his men “laughed very heartily at the New York detectives being discovered,” but the plight of Sampson and DeVoe underscored the dangers of exposure. In these circumstances, Ward Lamon’s indiscretion continued to prey on Pinkerton’s mind. On his return to Baltimore from Washington, Pinkerton’s train had crossed the path of the Lincoln Special at a watering stop in Annapolis. Pinkerton had crossed the platform and sought out Norman Judd, bending his ear about “the foolish conduct of Mr. Lamon.” Judd promised that he would “attend to the fool on his arrival in Washington.”

Pinkerton hoped that would settle the matter, but there was worse to come. Two days later, an alarming dispatch in the
New York World
reported on the doings of a mysterious group of detectives who had spent several weeks in Baltimore, “discovering whether any peril menaced Mr. Lincoln in his passage through that city.” This investigation, the
World
revealed, had been headed by “One Mr. Detective Pinkerton of Chicago—a gentleman of Vidocquean repute in the way of thief-taking—a very Napoleon in the respect of laying his hand upon the right man.” When a copy of this flattering but all too explicit account reached Pinkerton in Baltimore, hand-delivered by George H. Burns of Harnden’s Express, the detective sent the young messenger directly to Judd in Washington. “I directed Mr. Burns to say to Mr. Judd that Lamon and Judge Davis of Illinois were surely playing the Devil,” Pinkerton fumed, “and unless they shut their heads about me, I would be obliged to leave.”

In fact, though Pinkerton could not have known it at the time, the author of the account in the
World
was almost certainly John Hay, Lincoln’s private secretary, who would have heard a great deal of talk about “Mr. Detective Pinkerton” while aboard the Lincoln Special. The misunderstanding served to deepen Pinkerton’s ill feeling, and it would not be the last time he sought to make Ward Lamon shut his head.

*   *   *

FOR THE MOMENT,
as the day of Lincoln’s arrival in Washington drew to a close, Pinkerton had cause for satisfaction. Eighteen hours earlier, as the president-elect’s darkened sleeper car passed unnoticed through the streets of Baltimore, Pinkerton looked out and saw a city in “profound repose.” Now, he reported, there was more excitement than he had ever seen in his life. “Everybody appeared to be swearing mad,” and there was “no end to the imprecations which were poured out on Lincoln and the unknown spies.” Pinkerton spent about an hour mixing with a large gathering at the city’s post office. He would later say that he had never seen so many people in “such a heated, excitable state.” Walking back to his office to file a report, he allowed himself a moment of “quiet gratitude” that Lincoln had survived the day.

At the same moment, back at Willard’s Hotel in Washington, Lincoln was also feeling the press of a heated and excitable crowd. The president-elect had agreed to meet with a large delegation from the continuing Peace Convention, the proceedings of which had been interrupted by his arrival that morning. For many of the delegates, especially those who favored compromise with the secessionists, it was distasteful even to acknowledge Lincoln’s presence, much less extend an official greeting. “No delegate from a slave state had voted for him,” wrote Vermont’s Lucius Chittenden, “[and] many entertained for him sentiments of positive hatred. I heard him discussed as a curiosity by men as they would have spoken of a clown with whose ignorant vulgarity they were to be amused. They took him for an unlettered boor, with no fixed principles, whose nomination was an accident.”

In many ways this gathering would mark the culmination of Lincoln’s long journey from Springfield. He had set out with the intent of giving a nervous public the chance to see him in the flesh and hear something of his ideas. If the delegates were far from typical members of the electorate, being retired politicians and other men of influence, they represented a fair index of the strongly held opinions that had divided the country and brought Lincoln to Washington. As Chittenden noted, the circumstances of the meeting found Lincoln at a decided disadvantage. He was at the end of a long and grueling journey, and “had just escaped a conspiracy against his life.” It would have been natural, as he faced this “contemptuously inimical audience,” if he had seemed ill at ease. “But it was soon discovered,” Chittenden wrote, that the new president “was able to take care of himself.”

At nine o’clock that evening, Lincoln stood alone and unattended at the far end of one of the hotel’s large drawing rooms. As the delegates began to file in, he extended a personal greeting to each man, addressing many of them by name. “The manner in which he adjusted his conversation to representatives of different sections and opinions was striking,” said Chittenden. “He had some apt observation for each person ready the moment he heard his name.” When the son of Kentucky’s Henry Clay was presented to him, Lincoln was effusive: “Your name is all the endorsement I require. From my boyhood the name of Henry Clay has been an inspiration to me.”

Every so often, as the conversation touched upon “the great controversy of the hour,” a flash of icy resolve could be seen. At one stage, Virginia’s William Cabell Rives stepped forward to urge compromise with the secessionists. “I can do little, you can do much,” Rives intoned. “Everything now depends upon you.”

“I cannot agree to that,” Lincoln replied. “My course is as plain as a turnpike road. It is marked out by the Constitution. I am in no doubt which way to go. Suppose now we all stop discussing and try the experiment of obedience to the Constitution and the laws. Don’t you think it would work?”

There would be several more thrusts and parries of this type over the course of the next hour as Lincoln met each challenge with a show of courtesy tempered by resolve. As he spoke, Chittenden observed, the Republican delegates appeared both surprised and gratified, while several of the more ardent Southerners slipped quietly from the room. At last, one of the New York delegates asked pointedly if the North should not offer whatever concessions were necessary to avoid war. Such a conflict, he insisted, would be ruinous, plunging the nation into bankruptcy—so that “grass shall grow in the streets of our commercial cities.” Lincoln’s reply was unequivocal: “I will, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States,” he insisted. “It is not the Constitution as I would like to have it, but as it
is
, that is to be defended. The Constitution will not be preserved and defended until it is enforced and obeyed in every part of every one of the United States. It must be so respected, obeyed, enforced, and defended, let the grass grow where it may.”

These words, as well as the determined manner in which he spoke them, left a forceful impression. “He has been both misjudged and misunderstood by the Southern people,” William Rives remarked as the reception concluded. “His will not be a weak administration.”

*   *   *

IN THE DAYS TO COME,
as Pinkerton and many others observed, the pace of national events quickened to a “high gallop.” Soon enough, the Peace Convention would grind to an inconclusive halt, a compromise Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution having been proposed, an action that Nicolay and Hay would dismiss as “worthless as Dead Sea fruit.” At the Capitol on March 4, in the shadow of General Scott’s gun batteries, Lincoln delivered his carefully honed inaugural address in an earnest spirit of reconciliation. As he himself would later acknowledge, however, the scent of powder was already in the air. “All dreaded it, all sought to avert it,” he would say at his second inaugural, four years later. “While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to
saving
the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to
destroy
it without war—seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would
make
war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would
accept
war rather than let it perish. And the war came.”