OHIO

“Pimp!”

FEBRUARY 13–15

LINCOLN’S SPECIAL REACHED COLUMBUS, OHIO, AT TWO P.M. ON Wednesday, February 13, the day Congress was to certify the electoral vote; the day also that Virginia was to begin its secession convention. But as the hours and miles passed, Lincoln heard nothing. His train had expanded to three cars. Among the riders invited to travel with him on this leg was Larz Anderson, Major Anderson’s brother, from Cincinnati. The weather was “magnificent,” according to journalist Villard.

In Columbus, Lincoln was greeted by cannon fire and escorted by soldiers to the state house, where the Ohio legislature had convened to greet him. He gave a brief but curious speech that seemed crafted to counteract the aggression he had extemporaneously signaled in Indianapolis.

“I have not maintained silence from any want of real anxiety,” he said. “It is a good thing that there is no more than anxiety, for there is nothing going wrong. It is a consoling circumstance that when we look out, there is nothing that really hurts anybody. We entertain different views upon political questions, but nobody is suffering anything. This is a most consoling circumstance, and from it we may conclude that all we want is time, patience and a reliance on that God who has never forsaken this people.”

Even as he said this, however, concern in Washington mounted that the electoral count might be disrupted. That day crowds of irate Southerners had gathered in Washington and converged on the Capitol clamoring to get inside. General Scott, however, was well prepared. Soldiers manned the entrances and demanded to see passes before letting anyone in. Scott had positioned caches of arms throughout the building. A regiment of troops in plainclothes circulated among the crowd to stop any trouble before it started. The throng outside grew annoyed at being barred from entry and began firing off obscenities like grapeshot. If words could kill, one observer wrote, “the amount of profanity launched forth against the guards would have completely annihilated them.”

Much of this tirade was aimed at General Scott. It had no effect. He vowed that anyone who obstructed the count would be “lashed to the muzzle of a twelve-pounder and fired out of the window of the Capitol.” Scott would then “manure the hills of Arlington with the fragments of his body.”

Concern about the count was real and had intensified as the day approached. The fact was, the electoral votes were vulnerable. These were paper certificates that had to be transported from the Senate to the House, where Vice President Breckinridge would certify the count and announce the result. “This was the critical day for the peace of the capital,” wrote New York diarist George Templeton Strong. “A foray of Virginia gents … could have done infinite mischief by destroying the legal evidence of Lincoln’s election.”

Rep. Charles Francis Adams made it a point to attend the session. “I had never seen the ceremony before,” he wrote in his diary. “It is an imposing one, and yet it is the weak part of the constitution.” The founding fathers had offered no clear mechanism to manage a situation in which electoral votes were stolen or destroyed, he wrote. Still, the count went smoothly. “The proceeding occupied two hours, but it was conducted in profound tranquility, which relieves us all of a great weight.”

This tranquility abruptly disappeared, however, when Vice President Breckinridge issued the long-awaited announcement: “Abraham Lincoln, of Illinois, having received a majority of the whole number of the electoral votes, is elected president of the United States, for four years, commencing on the fourth of March.”

By this point quite a few unhappy people had managed to get inside the Capitol despite the Army’s vigilance. The galleries were packed, according to diarist Adams; members of the Peace Convention had flooded the House floor. Upon Breckinridge’s announcement, a burst of anger rose from within the chamber, with salvos of profanity launched at Winfield Scott, including such pearls as “Old dotard!” and “Free-state pimp!”

Lincoln got the news in a telegram that reached him at four-thirty P.M. while he was still in Columbus, where he would spend the night. “The votes were counted peaceably,” the telegram read. “You are elected.” A correspondent for the New York World observed that Lincoln “read it with his usual equanimity. The dispatch caused much rejoicing among his friends.”

But another, graver, threat loomed.

AS LINCOLN’S JOURNEY ADVANCED, reports from Pinkerton’s agents accumulated. The detective increasingly saw the threat to Lincoln as credible, or, as others would later claim, saw the value to himself of proclaiming it so. The Barnum of detective work, Pinkerton pursued his profession with the instincts of both a showman and a novelist, always aware of points of drama. His operatives were strictly limited to providing observations and were forbidden to talk to one another or to interpret what they saw. Only Pinkerton had that mandate. He cast himself as the intellectual center of his operation, the one who collected the various fragments of evidence and pieced them together to solve a crime. To allay any doubts that he was indeed the mastermind, he often wrote about his role or hired ghostwriters to do it for him. By the time of his death in 1884 at age sixty-four, he had published eighteen novels based loosely on his cases, among them The Somnambulist and the Detective and The Expressman and the Detective, and in so doing established himself as one of the most famous lawmen of all time.

The danger in Baltimore seemed extreme enough that Pinkerton decided to alert Lincoln’s aides. He knew that one of Lincoln’s friends was a key member of his traveling entourage, a railroad lawyer named Norman Judd who had been one of Pinkerton’s early clients—“a chunky gentleman of about five feet five inches,” according to one Washington correspondent.

Pinkerton sent Judd a tentative warning when Lincoln’s train passed through Cincinnati on February 13—so tentative, apparently, that Judd did not relay it to Lincoln. By Sunday, February 17, Pinkerton’s own observations and reports from his agents had convinced him that the plot to kill Lincoln was indeed real and that it would happen in Baltimore. He composed a letter in which he described his concerns, and then dispatched his lead female detective, Kate Warne, to New York to intercept Lincoln’s party and present the letter to Judd.

Warne arrived in New York early on February 19 and traveled to the Astor House, Lincoln’s hotel, where she arrived at about four in the morning. She had a long wait: Lincoln’s train wouldn’t reach New York for another eleven hours.