Civil War for the day

Harold Holzer continues The New York Times series on the history of the Civil War:

Just two years ago, President-elect Barack Obama staged the final leg of his pre-inaugural journey by boarding a train in Baltimore for a very public rally at the Amtrak station, followed by a leisurely rail journey to Washington, where the media and a large and exuberant crowd welcomed the future president and his wife. Preceding as it did Mr. Obama’s “new birth of freedom” inauguration, billed as a tribute to his hero, Abraham Lincoln, there was little doubt that the carefully crafted trip from Baltimore was meant as a symbolic prelude. Lincoln, too, had traveled from Baltimore to Washington on the final sprint of his own so-called journey to greatness.
But most Americans overlooked a critical historical irony: whereas Obama was greeted by a cheering crowd, Lincoln was met by a single friend; no one else in the capital even knew he was arriving. Following eleven days and more than 2,000 miles of travel on twenty different railroad lines, after making one hundred speeches and appearing at dozens of parades, receptions, dinners, and church services, Lincoln made the final leg of his journey in total secrecy, in the dead of night, disguised to avoid detection and, at one point, sleeping near a woman who was not his wife.
The bizarre episode began in Philadelphia, toward the end of what Lincoln called his “meandering” journey from Illinois. There he received a chilling report from detective Allan Pinkerton that assassins planned to kill him in Baltimore when he changed trains to continue his journey south. (at the time track lines didn’t connect, even in large cities, so he would have to go from one depot to another to reach southbound tracks).
The story sounded credible to Lincoln. Baltimore was the first southern, slaveholding city on Lincoln’s itinerary, and as such inherently dangerous territory. Walking from his train platform out into the street, no doubt wearing his signature stovepipe hat, the looming president-elect would have made a plum target. When warned that even Baltimore’s local police force might betray him in a pinch, Lincoln chose to abort his published schedule. Living to take office was more important than appearing in public in a city where only one or two percent of voters had supported him.
Bravely, Lincoln did insist on continuing his itinerary in Pennsylvania. He was feted in Philadelphia, then his train headed west to Harrisburg, where he had promised to appear with the state’s recently elected Republican governor, Andrew Curtin. But that night, in the midst of a supper in his honor, Lincoln slipped outside, donned a soft, wide-brimmed hat and long overcoat (“I was not the same man,” he later crowed) and raced off in a waiting carriage, accompanied only by Pinkerton and the president-elect’s physically imposing friend and bodyguard, Ward Hill Lamon. Pinkerton ordered telegraph wires severed to prevent leaks. (Oddly, Lincoln left behind the largest security retinue ever assigned to protect an incoming or sitting president.)
Arriving in Philadelphia around 10 p.m., Lincoln rode a carriage to the next depot and there boarded a sleeping car under an assumed name, with Pinkerton agent Kate Warne, posing as his sister, occupying a nearby bunk. After its arrival in Baltimore at 3:30 a.m., horses drew the sleeper from the Calvert Street to the Camden Street station and coupled it to a southbound locomotive. Pinkerton later insisted, as if to emphasize the danger, that he heard strains of the incendiary new pro-South song Maryland My Maryland wafting through the darkened streets.
Lincoln finally arrived in Washington at 6 a.m. on 23 February. Following a week and a half of loud and boisterous welcomes, the silence there must have seemed eerily portentous. No music played. Not a soul shouted his name. One old friend who spotted him on the lonely platform, Representative Elihu Washburne of Illinois, did try to approach. But so tense was the situation (the capital abounded with hostile slaveholders, several of whom had vowed Lincoln would not live to be sworn in) that when Washburne neared, Pinkerton tried to strike him.
News of Lincoln’s premature and clandestine arrival quickly found its way into the newspapers, and it shocked the country. Yet the incident might have been quickly forgotten had it not been for The New York Times. Its embedded inaugural journey reporter, Joseph Howard, no doubt incensed that he had been left behind in Harrisburg, reported that Lincoln had passed through Baltimore disguised in a “Scotch cap and military cloak”. Though Lincoln had worn no such garb, the calumny spread rapidly. (He likely intended his slur to hold meaning only for the president’s closest friends, for his claims could be read as coded messages. A scotch cap sounded just like a “scotch cop”, and the Glasgow-born Pinkerton was certainly that. Lamon had only recently been named an honorary colonel to validate his credentials as Lincoln’s protector, engendering much teasing, and he may have been Howard’s idea of a “military cloak”.)
Within days, editorials assailed him. Cartoons showing The Flight of Abraham poured off the presses, depicting him in the Howard-invented masquerade, running for his life and cowering in fear. Frederick Douglass compared Lincoln to a “poor, hunted fugitive slave” reaching his designation “in concealment, evading pursuers by the underground railroad, crawling and dodging under the sable wing of night.” Other observers were even less charitable. To the pro-secession Charleston Mercury, the country was “disgusted at his cowardly and undignified entry.” Even the New York Herald conceded that Lincoln had “crept into Washington” like “a thief in the night”.
Lincoln supposedly later confided that his Baltimore escapade was a mistake. For years, artists who wanted to cast him in a negative light would draw him in a beribboned Scottish tam. But in hindsight, was his decision unwise? Was the plot authentic? Was the most bizarre presidential journey in American history justified? It’s hard to know. Lincoln did not object to having his official traveling party, including his wife and sons, enter Baltimore later, as scheduled. Reportedly they were harassed but never really threatened.
What about Pinkerton’s report? Today he is best remembered not as a lifesaver but a chronic worry wart and exaggerator; his wildly inflated estimates of Confederate troop strength in 1862 scared Union General George B. McClellan into virtual paralysis. And he certainly did not hear Maryland My Maryland in Baltimore, because it had yet to be written. So there is reason to doubt the solidity of his evidence concerning an assassination plot.
On the other hand, just weeks after Lincoln evaded Baltimore, rioters there attacked a train bearing Massachusetts soldiers en route to Washington. Blood was spilled in the streets, inspiring a frightened mayor to rush to the White House and demand that the new president order future regiments to bypass his city.
If a Baltimore Plot existed at all, it was at most ad hoc, poorly organized, and probably destined to fail. But, as Lincoln’s private secretaries later insisted, “the fate of the government” required him to “shun all possible and unnecessary peril”. Lincoln had to reach Washington to rule there.

Until the end of his days, Lincoln’s bodyguard defended the evasion. Lamon (photo) insisted that “there never was a moment from the day he crossed the Maryland line, right up to the time of his assassination, that he was not in danger of death by violence.” And when Lincoln did die at the hands of an assassin in 1865, the killer hailed from Maryland.