WASHINGTON

A Rumor of Plaid

FEBRUARY 23

LINCOLN’S SECRET ARRIVAL TRANSFIXED WASHINGTON. A CORRESPONDENT for the New-York Times gushed, “The whole city has been agreeably surprised by the coup d’état of the President elect, who transported himself as if by the wand of an enchanter, from Philadelphia to Washington, without having been seen or even dreamed of.”

An article on the paper’s front page the next day, Monday, February 25, embedded an indelible image in the national imagination when it stated that Lincoln “wore a Scotch plaid cap and a very long military cloak, so that he was entirely unrecognizable.” Cartoonists, blessing the day, added a kilt; one depicted Lincoln with the now requisite Scotch cap peering from a freight car in wide-eyed terror at a cat in full hiss. Harper’s Weekly titled a four-part cartoon “The Flight of Abraham,” with Lincoln demonstrating courage in the first panel but then bolting in panic toward Washington, wearing of course a tam-o’-shanter. The legend made its way into Mary Chesnut’s diary. “Lincoln flew through Baltimore, locked up in an express car,” she wrote. “He wore a Scotch cap.” In another entry, she derided his “noble entrance into the Government of a free people.”

Columnists on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line skewered Lincoln, though the secessionist press tended to sneer rather than laugh. “Everybody here is disgusted at his cowardly and undignified entry,” reported the Charleston Mercury’s man in Washington. He accused Lincoln of exhibiting “the most wretched cowardice.” The proslavery New York Herald likened Lincoln’s arrival to that of a “thief in the night.” A number of newspapers observed that Lincoln’s journey was like a passage on the Underground Railroad, thereby conjuring in racist minds an image of Lincoln as a fugitive slave.

All this underscored an inescapable truth, that at a time when Lincoln needed to appear as commanding as possible, he had slipped quietly into the capital of the country he was now expected to lead. Thoughtful observers found little to laugh at. A diarist identified only as “Public Man” wrote that “when we have reached a point at which an elected President of the United States consents to be smuggled through by night to the capital of the country, lest he should be murdered in one of the chief cities of the Union, who can blame the rest of the world for believing that we are a failure?” Another diarist, George Templeton Strong, warned that much rested on whether the assassination plot was real. “It’s to be hoped that the conspiracy can be proved beyond cavil,” he wrote. “If it cannot be made manifest and indisputable, this surreptitious nocturnal dodging or sneaking of the President-elect into his capital city, under cloud of night, will be used to damage his moral position and throw ridicule on his administration.”

Unfortunately for Lincoln, the existence of a credible plot was anything but manifest and indisputable. No weapons were confiscated, no arrests made. The barber Ferrandini was accused of planning to kill Lincoln but was never formally indicted. No grand jury convened; no trial was held. Ward Lamon doubted that a specific plot existed. “It is perfectly manifest that there was no conspiracy,” he would write a decade later. Pinkerton dismissed him as a “brainless egotistical fool.” When Chicago’s mayor publicly accused Pinkerton of concocting a hoax, the two wound up battling it out with their fists on the street.

Doubts and competing claims would drive Pinkerton in 1868 to publish a defense meant not just to confirm the existence of the plot, but also to ensure that he got all the credit for saving Lincoln’s life and to rebut the counter claims of New York police superintendent John Kennedy that it was actually he and his New York City detectives who saved the day. Even so, doubts would linger into the twenty-first century, when an expert on Pinkerton’s practices would write, “There is no confirmation of a single particular of the plot outside of Pinkerton’s word.”

It was also the case that the original train, still commonly believed to be carrying Lincoln and still hewing to its published itinerary, and therefore still a likely target for any conspiracy, was unmolested when it entered Baltimore, according to private secretary Nicolay. Lincoln’s family, he wrote, “witnessed great crowds in the streets of Baltimore, but encountered neither turbulence nor incivility of any kind.”

Meanwhile newly elected Confederate President Jefferson Davis strode into Montgomery for his own inauguration ablaze with war lust, proclaiming that the North must be ready to “smell southern gunpowder and feel southern steel.”