WASHINGTON

One Very Dark Night

FEBRUARY 22

ON THE WAY TO HARRISBURG, LINCOLN STOPPED IN LEAMAN PLACE, Pennsylvania, near Lancaster. He was so hoarse he could barely speak. The waiting crowd, said to number five thousand, called instead for his wife to appear, at which point, according to the Lancaster Daily Evening Press, “Mr. L. brought her out, and said he had concluded to give them ‘the long and the short of it!’ This remark—alluding to the disparity between his height and hers—produced a loud burst of laughter, followed by enthusiastic cheers as the train moved off.”

This was Friday, February 22, the last day before Lincoln’s arrival in Washington. After Harrisburg, he was to travel in secret, accompanied only by his putative bodyguard Ward Lamon. The rest of his retinue would follow on the scheduled train and reach Baltimore at midday. “Tomorrow we enter slave territory,” secretary Hay wrote to a friend. “There may be trouble in Baltimore. If so, we will not go to Washington, unless in long, narrow boxes.”

Anxiety about the coming inauguration seemed to permeate the atmosphere. From William Seward’s home in Auburn, New York, his wife, Frances, wrote, “I shall not feel that you are quite safe until the 4th of March has passed. I am glad there is but 10 days more.” She added a wry observation about Lincoln’s journey thus far and his propensity for flirting with, and sometimes kissing, young women. “Mr. Lincoln is having a pleasing tour—it must be especially gratifying to the damsels who were kissed in the presence of the multitude. I wish men would not allow women to make fools of them but they do sometimes.”

IN WASHINGTON, GENERAL SCOTT’S soldiers, now numbering close to seven hundred, watched the streets—all armed, some on horseback, others manning cannon placed in sensitive locations. The cannon in particular raised dark imaginings and heightened the atmosphere of impending danger. Not everyone approved. The one Southern member on the House Treason Committee proposed a resolution demanding the immediate removal of the troops. Buchanan refused. He replied that if he had not deployed these men and “evil consequences” had followed, “I should never have forgiven myself.”

And then, that Friday night, an incident occurred that seemed to confirm the necessity of it all.

A thirty-six-year-old Republican congressman from New York named Charles H. Van Wyck strolled through a dark neighborhood just north of the U.S. Capitol. This was not the Van Wyck for whom a particularly clogged New York expressway would one day be named; that honor would go to future mayor Robert Van Wyck, who at this moment was eleven years old.

Van Wyck loathed slavery and was outspoken on the subject. The South still smarted from a speech he had delivered in March 1860 in which he had attacked slavery and the Democratic Party in lurid terms. He issued what to the Southern mind was an unforgivable slander: He called Southerners cowards. When published in the Congressional Globe, precursor to the Congressional Record, the speech ran to nearly eight full pages. It had not gone over well with Southern members of Congress. One, from Mississippi, called him a “scoundrel” and invited him to “go outside of the District of Columbia and test the question of personal courage with any southern man.”

Newspapers around the country reported Van Wyck’s speech. Death threats followed. But Van Wyck was undeterred. On Friday, February 22, as Lincoln was making his way to Harrisburg, Van Wyck delivered another attack on slavery. That night, as on other nights, he traveled armed, with a pistol in his pocket.

At about 11:30, three men approached. One came up beside him with a large bowie knife and stabbed him in the chest. The knife easily penetrated Van Wyck’s heavy overcoat, but the blade’s progress was impeded by a copy of the Globe folded several times over and “a pocket memorandum book of unusual thickness,” as the New-York Times reported. Otherwise, the Times judged, this first strike likely would have been fatal.

But now Van Wyck leapt into action. As he struggled with the first attacker, another, also armed with a knife, tried to stab him. Van Wyck grabbed that blade with his left hand and knocked the assailant down with a single right-hand punch, then pulled out his gun and shot the first man, who fell to the ground. A third attacker stepped in and knocked Van Wyck unconscious.

The men fled, undoubtedly afraid that Van Wyck would now draw from his coat a fully loaded cannon and full complement of cavalry. Van Wyck’s performance left the Times awestruck. “One man against three, attacked without any warning, in an unfrequented place, and in the shadow of a thick row of shade trees, and yet he managed to shoot one of his assailants, knock down another, and escaped with his life.”

Van Wyck survived. Whether the attack was politically motivated was never determined, but it seemed to be one more marker of the nation’s descent toward violence. As the Times asked, “Is this the beginning of assassination of Republicans here for the exercise of free speech?”