Ted Widmer - Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington

Invitation to join President-Elect Abraham Lincoln aboard the Presidential Special

• HENRY ADAMS: historian and observer, son of Representative Charles F. Adams (Sr.) of Massachusetts
• JOHN WILKES BOOTH: successful actor with Southern sympathies
• JAMES BUCHANAN: fifteenth president of the United States
• ANDREW CARNEGIE: assistant to Thomas Scott of the Pennsylvania Railroad
• LUCIUS CHITTENDEN: Vermont delegate to Washington Peace Conference
• JEFFERSON DAVIS: president-elect of the Confederate States of America
• DOROTHEA DIX: mental-health advocate with extensive political connections in the South
• FREDERICK DOUGLASS: antislavery advocate, author
• ELMER ELLSWORTH: organizer of Zouave militias
• SAMUEL FELTON: president of the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad
• CYPRIANO FERRANDINI: Corsican immigrant and barber in Baltimore
• MILLARD FILLMORE: thirteenth president of the United States
• HANNIBAL HAMLIN: vice president-elect of the United States
• JOHN HAY: assistant secretary to Abraham Lincoln
• GEORGE W. HAZZARD: captain in the United States Army
• JOSEPH HOWARD, JR.: New York Times correspondent
• WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS: Ohio writer
• DAVID HUNTER: major in the United States Army
• WILLIAM JOHNSON: African-American barber and valet to Abraham Lincoln
• NORMAN JUDD: Chicago-based friend to Lincoln, liaison to detectives
• WARD HILL LAMON: friend and bodyguard to Abraham Lincoln
• MARY ANN CUSTIS LEE: great-granddaughter of Martha Washington, and wife of Robert E. Lee
• ROBERT E. LEE: lieutenant colonel in the United States Army
• ABRAHAM LINCOLN: president-elect of the United States
• MARY TODD LINCOLN: wife of Abraham Lincoln
• ROBERT TODD LINCOLN: eldest son of Abraham Lincoln
• TAD LINCOLN: son of Abraham Lincoln
• WILLIE LINCOLN: son of Abraham Lincoln
• JOHN NICOLAY: secretary to Abraham Lincoln
• ALLAN PINKERTON: detective
• JOHN POPE: captain in the United States Army
• THOMAS SCOTT: Pennsylvania Railroad official
• WINFIELD SCOTT: commanding general of the United States Army
• FREDERICK SEWARD: son of and assistant to William Henry Seward
• WILLIAM HENRY SEWARD: New York senator and future secretary of state
• ALEXANDER STEPHENS: vice president-elect of the Confederate States of America
• CHARLES P. STONE: aide to Winfield Scott and colonel in the United States Army
• GEORGE TEMPLETON STRONG: New York lawyer and diarist
• JOHN TYLER: tenth president of the United States
• EDWIN SUMNER: colonel in the United States Army
• HENRY VILLARD: German immigrant, New York Herald correspondent
• KATE WARNE: detective
• ELIHU WASHBURNE: friend to Abraham Lincoln, Illinois member of the House of Representatives
• THURLOW WEED: New York political boss
• WALT WHITMAN: itinerant carpenter and poet from Brooklyn
• FERNANDO WOOD: Mayor of New York City
• WILLIAM WOOD: trip organizer

Troy, Kansas

PROLOGUE THE HOLY TOWN OF TROY

Tell me about a complicated man.

Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost

when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy,

and where he went, and who he met, the pain

he suffered in the storms at sea, and how

he worked to save his life and bring his men

back home.

Tell the old story for our modern times.

Find the beginning.

Homer, The Odyssey, book 1, lines 111

T he wind whips across the prairie in late November, hinting at the wrath of winter to come. In 1859 a German immigrant, Henry Villard, was fighting the cold as he drove his wagon east from Colorado, where he had been living among gold prospectors. Villard had a long way to go650 miles in allsnaking along the Platte River, through Nebraska and Kansas, as he made his way back toward the Missouri River, and civilization. He survived by constantly gathering buffalo chips, or dried dung, which he burned to stay warm and cook his meals. At night, he slept outdoors, covered with buffalo pelts. The prairie traveler is not particular about toilette, noted an English traveler after meeting a rough specimen in the same parts, who unsheathed a long knife he called his Arkansas toothpick. One night it snowed eighteen inches, but Villard kept going, desperate to reach his destination before more storms came through.

Thirty miles west of Saint Joseph, Missouri, Villard saw a distant speck on the immense horizon, growing larger, kicking up dust. As it came closer, the speck grew into a horse and buggy, with two occupants. Surprisingly, Villard recognized one of the passengers. He had been in Illinois a year earlier, during the excitement of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, and as the carriage approached, he began to make out the ungainly form of Abraham Lincoln himself, four hundred miles west of where he normally could be found.

Lincoln laughed when he realized that Villard had transformed himself into a full-fledged pioneer. A year earlier, Lincoln had known him as a clean-shaven reporter for the German-American press. Now he was almost unrecognizable beneath a luxuriant beard and all those buffalo pelts. For his part, Villard was amazed to encounter Lincoln, still smooth-faced, with nothing to protect him from the prairie wind except a short overcoat and no covering for his long legs. To make matters worse, he was heading directly into the rough weather Villard had put behind him.