WASHINGTON AND PHILADELPHIA

Dual Warning

FEBRUARY 21

IN WASHINGTON, GEN. WINFIELD SCOTT, WHO HAD RECEIVED DOROTHEA Dix’s warning as relayed by railroad executive Samuel Felton, heard further talk of a potential assassination and launched his own investigation.

The general recruited expert help: the head of the New York City police department, John A. Kennedy, who had recently achieved notoriety for authorizing the seizure in New York Harbor of a shipment of muskets bound for Georgia. Of his own volition, Kennedy had already sent three of his detectives to Washington to investigate threats to the city and to the peaceful transfer of power; now he resolved to go himself “to look over the field.”

General Scott offered Kennedy an aide from his own staff and gave him a choice between two accomplished officers, Col. Charles P. Stone and another colonel named Robert E. Lee. “I don’t know what induced me to select” Stone, Kennedy said later, “but I did so, and told him of my three detectives in the city and their findings.” After a four-year hiatus from the U.S. Army, Stone had newly returned to military life at the request of General Scott, who appointed him inspector general of the District of Columbia Militia.

Like Pinkerton before him, Kennedy also sent detectives into Southern cities. New York officers found themselves exploring the demimonde of Baltimore, Richmond, and Alexandria. In Baltimore a New York police detective named David S. Bookstaver posed as a music agent. Whether Bookstaver ever ran into Pinkerton or his operatives is unclear, but suddenly, it seems, the border South and Baltimore in particular were crawling with detectives, all hearing the same alarming chatter in hotels, bars, and billiard rooms. Bookstaver was so unsettled by what he heard that he took his concerns directly to Colonel Stone in Washington, who in turn passed them on to General Scott.

Lincoln was now two days away from his arrival at Baltimore and his perilous transfer to the B&O line for the final run to Washington. On Thursday, February 21, General Scott met with William Henry Seward and described what the New York detectives and Colonel Stone had learned about the conspiracy now apparently maturing in Baltimore. Seward, too, grew concerned. He asked Scott to have Stone put his report in writing.

Seward resolved to send a warning to Lincoln by the most secure messenger at hand: his own son, Frederick, thirty, soon to become his assistant secretary of state. Seward sent for him at once.

“I was in the gallery of the Senate Chamber shortly after noon on Thursday,” Frederick wrote later, “when one of the pages touched my elbow, and told me that Senator Seward wished to see me immediately.” He found his father waiting in the building lobby. Seward handed Frederick a letter that he himself had just written to Lincoln, along with Colonel Stone’s report and a note from General Scott.

“Whether this story is well founded or not,” Seward told his son, “Mr. Lincoln ought to know of it at once.” He saw no reason for doubt. “General Scott is impressed with the belief that the danger is real,” he told Frederick. “Colonel Stone has facilities for knowing, and is not apt to exaggerate.” Lincoln needed to see these documents as soon as possible, Seward said. “I want you to go by the first train. Find Mr. Lincoln, wherever he is. Let no one else know your errand.”

He also told Frederick that in his cover letter he was advising Lincoln to change the time of his planned passage through Baltimore. “I know it may occasion some embarrassment, and, perhaps, some ill-natured talk,” Seward said. “Nevertheless, I would strongly advise him to do it.”

All Frederick knew at this point was that Lincoln by now would be somewhere in Philadelphia. He boarded the next train and headed north.

“The train, a tedious one, brought me into Philadelphia about ten o’clock at night,” he recalled.

Along the way he had learned from his fellow passengers and from newspaper reports that Lincoln and his retinue planned to spend that night at the Continental Hotel, a massive Italianate structure at Ninth and Chestnut in the heart of the city, four blocks from Independence Hall. At the time of its completion a year earlier it was reputed to be the largest hotel in the nation, with seven hundred rooms for up to twelve hundred guests. Frederick made his way there through streets crowded with cheering celebrants and resounding with music. “Within, the halls and stairways were packed, and the brilliantly-lighted parlors were filled with ladies and gentlemen, who had come to ‘pay their respects,’” he wrote. The crowd seemed to grow especially dense ahead of him, and he presumed that Lincoln would be at its center. “Clearly, this was no time for the delivery of a confidential message.”

He found Lincoln’s son Robert and introduced himself; Robert in turn directed him to Ward Lamon, Lincoln’s tall and powerfully built bodyguard, who took Frederick by the arm and said he would bring him to Lincoln right away.

Frederick hesitated; he wanted as private a meeting as possible. At this, Lamon laughed.

“Then, I think I had better take you to his bedroom,” Lamon said. “If you don’t mind waiting there, you’ll be sure to meet him, for he has got to go there some time tonight; and it is the only place I know of where he will be likely to be alone.”

ELSEWHERE IN THE CITY, on that same day, Lincoln’s aide, Norman Judd, received a cryptic message requesting that he come to another hotel—the St. Louis, on Chestnut Street—to meet a man named J. H. Hutchinson. Judd arrived around six forty-five P.M. and this time found Allan Pinkerton himself. Also present was Samuel Felton, the railroad president.

Pinkerton wanted this meeting because he believed the details of the alleged plot had grown alarming enough that Lincoln needed to be informed face-to-face. The detective told Judd he was so convinced that an assassination attempt would be made in Baltimore that he believed the president-elect should abandon the rest of his schedule and leave for Washington immediately to upset whatever arrangements the conspirators might have in place.

Lincoln still had a long night ahead of him full of social responsibilities, set to culminate in a display of fireworks. It was after ten P.M. by the time he was at last free to meet with Pinkerton—roughly the same time that Frederick Seward was making his way to the Continental Hotel. By this time Pinkerton had left his own hotel and had come to the Continental, to Judd’s room, wholly unaware that Seward’s son would soon be in the same building. Judd sent Lincoln a note asking him to come to his room “so soon as convenient on private business of importance.”

Lincoln arrived around eleven P.M. followed by a large crowd, which one of his associates managed to halt at the door. Lincoln recognized Pinkerton from prior business encounters and greeted the detective warmly. Pinkerton told his story. Lincoln listened intently but was skeptical. Pinkerton watched him. “During the entire interview,” Pinkerton wrote, “he had not evinced the slightest evidence of agitation or fear. Calm and self-possessed, his only sentiments appeared to be those of profound regret, that the Southern sympathizers could be so far led away by the excitement of the hour, as to consider his death a necessity for the furtherance of their cause.”

When Pinkerton urged Lincoln to leave immediately for Washington on a train scheduled to depart Philadelphia in one hour, he rejected the idea. “I didn’t like that,” Lincoln would later tell an early biographer. “I had made engagements to visit Harrisburg and go from there to Baltimore and I resolved to do so. I could not believe there was a plot to murder me.”

Lincoln considered the next morning to be particularly important. He had timed his Philadelphia stop to coincide with Washington’s birthday itself. He was scheduled to climb atop a stage in front of Independence Hall and raise the new thirty-four-star American flag. The symbolism was powerful. The flag represented the entire Union, seceded states and all. Only his actual arrival in Washington would have more importance.

Meanwhile, in Lincoln’s bedroom at the Continental, Frederick Seward waited, savoring the quiet “that was in such contrast to the bustle outside.”

AFTER FREDERICK HAD WAITED over an hour, he was at last retrieved by Ward Lamon for his meeting with Lincoln. Frederick had never seen Lincoln in person, only “campaign portraits,” but now here came the man himself, striding toward him down the hall. “I could not but notice how accurately they had copied his features,” Frederick wrote, “and how totally they had omitted his care-worn look, and his pleasant, kindly smile.”

The two exchanged greetings. Lincoln made polite inquiries about Frederick’s father and how things were going in Washington. Frederick gave him the three messages: one from his father, one from General Scott, and the report from Col. Charles Stone. Lincoln took a seat at a table under a gas lamp and began to read. Gas lamps were not yet able to cast light directly downward, only up into globes or reflectors, which made reading possible but difficult. The gas made a quiet whooshing sound, like someone blowing air softly through his lips.

Stone’s report was direct. Its first sentence read: “A New York detective officer who has been on duty for three weeks past, reports there is serious danger of violence to, and the assassination of, Mr. Lincoln, in his passage through the city should the time of passage be known.” The detective, Stone wrote, had only recently come to believe Lincoln might be endangered, “but now he deems it imminent—He deems the danger one which the authorities and people in Balt. cannot guard against.”

Lincoln read the report in silence with no sign of worry, at least none that Frederick could detect. “Although its contents were of a somewhat startling nature,” Frederick recalled, “he made no exclamation, and I saw no sign of surprise in his face.” Frederick was unaware of Lincoln’s meeting earlier that night with Allan Pinkerton.

Lincoln read the report through, then read it again. He turned to Frederick.

“Did you hear anything about the way this information was obtained?” he asked. “Do you know anything about how they got it?”

This was the first of a number of pointed questions that Frederick was hard-pressed to answer.

“Your father and General Scott do not say who they think are concerned in it,” Lincoln said. “Do they think they know?”

Frederick could offer little, other than to say that he believed his father’s knowledge of the conspiracy was limited to the contents of Colonel Stone’s report.

“Did you hear any names mentioned?” Lincoln pressed. “Did you, for instance, ever hear anything said about such a name as Pinkerton?”

No, Frederick answered; only General Scott and Colonel Stone.

Lincoln paused.

“I may as well tell you why I ask,” Lincoln said. He explained that even before his departure from Springfield there had been rumors of trouble. “I never attached much importance to them—never wanted to believe any such thing.” Meanwhile, he continued, Pinkerton without his knowledge had become involved and had begun reporting his findings to Norman Judd. Lincoln told Frederick that earlier that very evening he had met with Pinkerton and heard him warn of “an attempt on my life in the confusion and hurly-burly of the reception at Baltimore.”

To Frederick this seemed “a strong corroboration” of the danger Lincoln faced, but Lincoln did not see it that way.

He smiled, shook his head. “That is exactly why I was asking you about names. If different persons, not knowing of each other’s work, have been pursuing separate clues that led to the same result, why then it shows there may be something in it. But if this is only the same story, filtered through two channels, and reaching me in two ways, then that don’t make it any stronger. Don’t you see?”

Frederick told him he believed the two investigations were independent and that out of prudence Lincoln should adopt his father’s suggestion to change the time and manner of his final train ride to Baltimore.

“Well, we haven’t got to decide it to-night,” Lincoln said, “and I see it is getting late.”

Lincoln sensed Frederick’s disappointment at his not immediately heeding the warning. With kindness in his voice (as Frederick later recalled), Lincoln said: “You need not think I will not consider it well. I shall think it over carefully, and try to decide it right; and I will let you know in the morning.”