The Hour of Peril: The Secret Plot to Murder Lincoln Before the Civil War Read Free

White House. Looking gray and doddery, President James Buchanan eased himself down from the open coach. The Old Public Functionary, as he was known, had just departed the Executive Mansion for the last time as president. In keeping with the solemnity of the occasion, he wore a formal but out-of-date swallowtail coat and an immense white cravat that spread over his chest “like a poultice.” He appeared thoroughly worn-out, one observer noted, and had few political allies left to mourn his exit. “The sun, thank God, has risen upon the last day of the administration of James Buchanan,” declared the New York World.
    Willard’s Hotel, the city’s largest, was packed to capacity for the inaugural festivities, with proprietor Henry A. Willard booking an average of three people to a room. In the words of Nathaniel Hawthorne, the stately six-story building could be “much more justly called the centre of Washington and the Union than either the Capitol, the White House, or the State Department.” This had been especially true since the arrival ten days earlier of President-elect Abraham Lincoln, whose presence in the hotel had sparked a “quadrennial revel” of visitors. “Everybody may be seen there,” Hawthorne would write. “You exchange nods with governors of sovereign States; you elbow illustrious men, and tread on the toes of generals.”
    The arrival of President Buchanan would mark the end to the political scrum. Pausing for a moment outside the hotel, Buchanan removed his low-crowned silk hat and passed through the side entrance. Moments later, he reemerged, walking arm in arm with Abraham Lincoln. The president-elect wore a new black cashmere suit, which had been made for him in Chicago, and carried a gold-tipped ebony cane. As the two men stepped into the waiting carriage, a group of soldiers standing near the hotel entrance snapped to attention, and a Marine band struck up “Hail to the Chief.” Lincoln smiled and tipped his stovepipe hat, but his face appeared drawn and even more heavily lined than usual. He had been up most of the night, laboring over a final draft of his inaugural address. Moments earlier, while waiting for Buchanan to arrive, he had sat jotting notes as his son Robert read the speech aloud, giving him a better sense of how the words would strike the ears of his listeners. Distracted by this last-minute tinkering, Lincoln left Willard’s Hotel without paying his tab. Several weeks later, when the lapse was brought to his attention, he sent the money over from the White House with a note of apology.
    Lincoln and Buchanan sat side by side as their driver swung the carriage onto Pennsylvania Avenue, signaling the start of a “glad and sumptuous” parade that would carry them to the Capitol. The hour-long procession featured floats, marching bands, columns of veterans of the War of 1812, and a richly appointed “tableau car” carrying thirty-four “beauteous little girls,” each representing a state of the Union. A throng of some 25,000 people crowded along both sides of the broad avenue. Many in the crowd had come from out of town to witness the proceedings, and a few had been obliged to spend the night sleeping on the pavement after being turned away at the city’s overbooked hotels. Those who could not get a clear view scrambled for higher ground. “The trees upon the corners,” reported a Philadelphia paper, were “as full of small boys as an apple tree in fruit-bearing season.”

“The Inaugural Procession at Washington,” from Harper’s Weekly, March 1861. Courtesy of the Library of Congress
    The temperature that afternoon had turned cool and bracing, and it is likely that the atmosphere in the presidential carriage was chillier still. During his campaign, Lincoln had criticized Buchanan sharply, though neither man escaped censure in the press as Inauguration Day approached, especially in the South: “An imbecile official is succeeded by a stupid Rail Splitter,”