Assassination plots were the bookends of Abe Lincoln’s presidency. You know about the one that killed him, but the first one began this week (Feb. 21) in 1861 as Lincoln was traveling to Washington, D.C., to assume the presidency. At a stopover in Philadelphia, Lincoln’s security guard, Alan Pinkerton, informed him that southern sympathizers were planning to assassinate him the next day in Baltimore, where Lincoln was to change trains for the trip’s final leg to the nation’s capital.
Although a brave man, Lincoln was persuaded by Pinkerton to don a disguise — a long overcoat and oversized cap — and pose as the invalid brother of one of Pinkerton’s (also disguised) female agents. Thus the 16th president of the United States literally snuck into Washington for his own Inauguration.
He would regret it. The press got wind of it and had a field day, especially opposition newspapers, and Lincoln was mocked as a coward, a bumpkin and a sneak. Editorial cartoonists dressed him up in various ridiculous disguises and had him quivering with fear, while rumors spread that Lincoln was afraid to travel in an open carriage.
And history would regret it as well, for the ridicule may have contributed to Lincoln’s subsequent cavalier disregard for his own safety. From then on Lincoln was reluctant to take even sensible precautions against possible harm, and on more than one occasion he actually courted danger.
Not that there was much Lincoln could have done to foil a determined assassin, especially since presidents in Lincoln’s day met regularly with long lines of office-seekers, petitioners, would-be advisors, and the like. And Lincoln, who presided over a bitter Civil War, was especially vulnerable since his duties brought him in regular contact with southerners and southern sympathizers.
It was one of the latter, the actor John Wilkes Booth, who became America’s first presidential assassin by walking through the unguarded door to Lincoln’s box at Ford’s Theatre and shooting him at point-blank range. Thus ended the life of (in my opinion) America’s greatest president.
Actually, Lincoln had taken one safety precaution against assassination, albeit in an off-hand way. During his first term he had chosen Hannibal Hamlin as his vice-president, a man far more dedicated to freeing the slaves than Lincoln had ever been. Lincoln even joked that no southerner would risk killing him, only to get a zealous abolitionist like Hamlin in his stead.
Alas, in Lincoln’s second term Hamlin was replaced by Andrew Johnson, a die-hard southerner who, as president, fashioned post-war Reconstruction policies so favorable to the Confederacy that the House of Representatives impeached him. Whether or not Johnson replacing Hamlin was a green light for Booth can’t be known, but it couldn’t have helped.
