Lincoln Abraham - The battles that made Abraham Lincoln : how Lincoln mastered his enemies to win the Civil War, free the slaves, and preserve the Union

O n February 23, 1861, nine days before his inauguration, President-elect Abraham Lincoln sneaked into Washington on a secret night train, disguised in a soft felt hat, muffler, and short bobtail overcoat. Detective Allan Pinkerton, who traveled with him, provided the affair with a cloak-and-dagger coda when he telegraphed Lincolns friends: Plums arrived here with Nuts this morningall right.

Lincoln had departed his home in Springfield, Illinois, twelve days earlier for a train tour across the northern states to Washington. The tour was a stately ceremonial procession, intended to introduce the new President-elect to the people. Bonfires, parades, cannon salutes, and noisy crowds greeted Lincolns train at every stop. All the major cities through which he would pass had formally invited him to speak, except the lastno welcome had come from Baltimore.

Marylands northern border marked the point where Lincoln would enter a slave state for the first time. Here he would go from a loyal region to one seething with rebellion. Baltimores sullen silence was especially alarming since there the presidential cars would have to stop, uncouple, and be drawn by horses across a mile of city streets before being put back on the rails to Washington. The citys nickname was Mobtown. Its political thugs, the Blood Tubs and Plug Uglies, were notorious as the most vicious in the entire country, and if they rushed the train they were not likely to be stopped by police whose marshal, George P. Kane, was an open secessionist. A military escort couldnt be trusted, eitherthe local militia companies were drilling nightly for the moment when they would seize the city buildings and hoist the Confederate flag.

On February 21, two days before Lincolns scheduled passage through Baltimore, the presidential train reached Philadelphia. That evening, as Lincoln shook hands with the crowd that packed the parlor of the Continental Hotel, his secretary tapped him on the shoulder and motioned him into a back room. There he learned that Detective Pinkerton, working for the railroad whose line would take him to Washington, had uncovered a plot to assassinate him on his way through Baltimore. That same night, another messenger brought word that Charles Stone, the head of the loyal Washington militia, who had placed his own detectives in Baltimore, had also discovered a plot for the destruction of Mr. Lincoln during his passage through the city. When Lincoln reached his hotel in the Pennsylvania capital of Harrisburg the next day, friends pleaded with him to dodge the Baltimore threat.

Lincoln was reluctant. What would the nation think of its President stealing into its capital like a thief in the night? he groaned. The nation, however, was at such a hair trigger that General-in-Chief Winfield Scott had warned, a dog fight now might cause the gutters to run with blood. The stakes were too great for the risk to be ignored, and Lincolns friends persuaded him to change his schedule and pass incognito on a secret midnight special through Baltimore.

Two hundred men, secretly armed and organized, were detailed to guard railway bridges and crossings along the route. To camouflage their purpose, they went to work whitewashing the bridges, which they did continuously for hoursfive, six, seven coats. Telegraph wires were cut along the route to intercept hostile messages and maintain the illusion that Lincoln was remaining overnight in Pennsylvania.

After dark, Lincoln was smuggled out of his Harrisburg hotel in a closed, horse-drawn coach that sped to the railway depot by a winding route, and soon he was on a train plunging through the dark toward Philadelphia. There, Detective Pinkerton and the countrys first female detective, Kate Warne, had arranged to hold the eleven oclock train to Washington until Lincoln arrived, on the pretense of delivering an important package to the conductor, who was told the package had to be delivered to Washington by morning. For this last leg of the journey, Warne had reserved a seat for an invalid in the last car of the train.

The important package, actually a bundle of old newspapers, was delivered to the unsuspecting conductor, and the invalidLincolnwas secreted into a berth in the rear car at the same time. Pinkerton gave the new passengers ticket to the conductor, explaining that Warnes invalid friend must not be disturbed. Pinkerton rode most of the way on the rear platform of the train, watching for signals flashed by the guards at the bridges and crossings as they sped by. A second bodyguard, Lincolns friend Ward Hill Lamon, sat inside with the contraband President-elect, his pockets bristling with two pistols, two small derringers, and two bowie knives. The trip went quietly, and Lincoln stepped onto the platform in Washington just before dawn, embarrassed by his undignified spy-thriller entry into the capital. He was greeted by a lone congressman and whisked to a closely guarded reception at Willards Hotel.

Outside the small circle who greeted him at Willards, the first to find out about Lincolns secret disappearance were the ten thousand drawn up at Calvert Station in Baltimore later that day waiting to get a look at the new President-elect and hoot at him. An early train was mistaken for Lincolns, and according to the report in the Baltimore Sun , as soon as the train stopped, the crowd leaped upon the platforms, and mounted to the tops of the cars like so many monkeys, until like a hive of bees they swarmed upon them, shouting, hallooing and making all manner of noises.