PHILADELPHIA

Dorothea’s Warning

JANUARY

ON A SATURDAY IN JANUARY 1861, A WOMAN WALKED INTO THE Philadelphia office of Samuel M. Felton, Sr., president of the Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Baltimore Railroad, with an urgent story to tell, something she had discovered while traveling through the South promoting the creation of more-humane asylums. Her story had nothing to do with insanity, however—at least not the organic kind that consumed her days.

Felton knew this visitor, Dorothea Dix, from years of prior acquaintance. Out of respect for her work he had given her a rail pass for free travel on his road. Now fifty-eight years old, she was tall and thin, a flagstaff in dark silk. She wore her deep-brown hair parted at the center, drawn back into a braided bun; her facial features were small—not pinched, exactly, but cramped in a way that gave her a vinegary aspect. In contrast, Felton, fifty-one, clean-shaven and smooth-featured, conveyed an affable openness.

Ordinarily confident to the point of seeming imperious, Dix had found herself uncertain as to who should hear her story, even whether she should tell it at all, for to tell it risked betraying the confidences of others. During her travels she had encountered many Southerners at all levels of society who welcomed her into their inner circles despite her New England roots. She despised abolitionists, befriended slaveholders. While ardently and single-mindedly committed to helping the insane, and convinced that she acted at the direction of God—“I am the instrument to do his holy will”—she expressed little concern for the vastly greater proportion of the South’s population consigned to slavery. Instead she embraced the proslavery ethos of James Hammond and Edmund Ruffin, at one point observing, while traveling in North Carolina, that “negroes are gay, obliging, and anything but miserable.”

As a result, her Southern hosts spoke to her with great candor about their fear of Lincoln and what he might do once in office. Although for the most part oblivious to politics, even Dix understood that there was more here than simple anxiety. This was desperation. The wild passion for secession was, she acknowledged, a kind of insanity in itself. She told Felton she had found evidence of a rapidly advancing plot to assassinate Lincoln and take over the government. Her deep voice and grave appearance added an aura of credibility to her story. “For more than an hour she related to me what I had heard before in rumors,” Felton wrote. “The sum of it was that there was an organized and extensive conspiracy to seize Washington.” The conspirators would then declare themselves to be the government, Dix told him. “The whole was to be a coup d’état.” She had details: She described how the conspirators had studied the rail bridges into Baltimore and how they proposed also to interrupt the railroad line south of the city, the only north–south line into Washington. Whoever controlled it and the telegraph lines that ran alongside would control all access to the capital from the north.

Her story echoed reports from Felton’s own men about similar plans they had overheard while working along the railroad’s Philadelphia-to-Baltimore route. They told Felton that secessionists planned to burn railroad bridges and commandeer the large steam ferry at Havre de Grace, Maryland, which carried trains and other traffic across the Susquehanna River. The bridges were made of wood; the ferry was the sole means by which trains from the North could connect to the final forty-mile stretch of tracks into Baltimore, and thus a crucial and fragile nexus.

Alarmed anew, Felton sent an associate to Washington to meet with Gen. Winfield Scott and convey all that Dix had told him. With Lincoln soon to begin his inaugural journey, the danger seemed imminent. Felton also took more direct and practical action. His railroad and others had long employed Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency, founded in 1850, to protect their lines and prevent theft by employees. Conductors, the agency found, were deft at pocketing money from cash fares, a few dollars here, a quarter there. Felton now contacted the agency’s founder, Allan Pinkerton, and asked him to investigate not just the threat to the president-elect, but to the tracks, trestles, and other structures that comprised his railroad, all of which seemed likely targets for sabotage.

A man of the Railroad Age, Pinkerton immediately set out for Philadelphia, arriving on January 19 to meet in person with Felton. Pinkerton took the assignment. A week later, in a January 27 letter to Felton, he outlined his plan, which hinged on placing “an unceasing Shadow” on the likely conspirators, even in their homes or boarding houses.

Five days later, on February 1, Pinkerton and eight of his agents, whom he called “operatives,” were on their way south, among them twenty-seven-year-old Kate Warne, chief of the agency’s female detectives, who, according to Pinkerton, could be commanding and vivacious but also possessed “that rare quality in womankind, the art of being silent.” The plan was to converge on Baltimore. There, Lincoln’s train would stop at the city’s Calvert Street Station; he would then have to walk or ride by carriage about a mile to another station, at Camden Street, for the final leg of his journey to Washington. Under ordinary circumstances, this would have afforded an ideal opportunity for a welcome parade to escort Lincoln to his next train, but these were anything but ordinary times, and this was no ordinary city. Maryland was a slave state, part of what was considered the border South, and Baltimore, its principal city, seethed with secessionist zeal. Pinkerton and Felton agreed that it was during that transfer between trains, in a slaveholding city sympathetic to disunion, that Lincoln would be most vulnerable. Moreover, the city’s chief of police, George P. Kane, was an avowed secessionist who made it clear that he had no intention of deploying officers to help protect Lincoln as he traversed the city.

On the way south, Pinkerton placed agents at various points in Delaware and Maryland to gauge the level of unrest. They followed Pinkerton’s tried-and-true modus operandi: infiltrate and observe. In his manual for training new operatives he called it “Testing,” a potentially months-long process that hinged on the operatives’ “being entirely unobserved and unnoticed.”

In Baltimore, Pinkerton himself rented a house on South Street to use as his headquarters. “The building I had selected was admirably adapted for my purpose,” he wrote later, “and was so constructed that entrance could be gained to it from all four sides, through alleyways that led in from neighboring streets.” He also rented an office downtown, which he occupied in the guise of “John H. Hutchinson,” a fictive stockbroker from Charleston. One of his operatives, Timothy Webster, managed to join a volunteer militia in Perrymansville, Maryland, that had the stated goal of repelling invasion from the North. Webster soon found that its true intent was to ensure that “no damned Yankee could ever get through to sit in the Presidential chair.”

Kate Warne, deploying an understanding of Southern men and manners gained from a prior investigation in Alabama, pinned a blue cockade to her clothing and posed as a zealous secessionist; she gained entrée to the highest levels of Baltimore society. Still another operative—Harry Davies, under the alias Joseph Howard—claimed to have won an introduction to the alleged head of an assassination cabal in Baltimore. He was then invited to participate in a clandestine ceremony held in a dark room, where participants swore themselves to secrecy and drew lots for the privilege of killing Lincoln. The coveted ballots, eight of them, were marked in red. Once Lincoln was dead, the assassins would board a waiting steamship and flee south to what they expected would be a hero’s welcome.

Pinkerton claimed that he, too, had met the cabal’s ringleader, Cypriano Ferrandini, a Baltimore barber, and heard him vow, “Lincoln shall die in this city.”