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

declared an Atlanta newspaper. As the carriage neared the Capitol, however, Buchanan is said to have struck a conciliatory note. Anticipating his return to his estate in Pennsylvania, the outgoing president turned to his successor. “My dear sir,” he said, “if you are as happy in entering the White House as I shall feel on returning to Wheatland, you are a happy man indeed.”
    Lincoln, by all accounts, gave a delicate reply: “Mr. President, I cannot say that I shall enter it with much pleasure, but I assure you that I shall do what I can to maintain the high standards set by my illustrious predecessors who have occupied it.”
    Barely two and a half years had elapsed since Lincoln had launched his campaign for the United States Senate—and the historic series of debates against Stephen A. Douglas—with his famous warning of the dangers of disunion over the issue of slavery: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” Now, as Lincoln prepared to take the oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution” as president of the United States, many of the diplomats and politicians gathered at the Capitol believed that a civil war was inevitable and that Lincoln would take office only to preside over the disintegration of the Union. Almost at that very moment, some seven hundred miles away in Montgomery, Alabama, the “Stars and Bars” flag of the Confederacy was being raised at the state capitol, with seven stars to represent the seven states that had already seceded.
    “A more enviable, but at the same time more delicate and more hazardous lot than that accorded to Abraham Lincoln never fell to any member of this nation,” wrote journalist Henry Villard in the New York Herald. “The path he is about to walk on may lead to success, glory, immortality, but also to failure, humiliation and curses upon his memory. He may steer clear of the rock of disunion and the shoal of dissension among those that elevated him to the office he is about to assume, and safely conduct the Ship of State from amidst the turbulence of fanaticism and lawlessness to the port of peace and reunion. But he may, on the other hand, take his place at the helm of the craft only to sink with it.”
    In keeping with the gravity of the moment, Lincoln had spent weeks laboring over his inaugural address, which he saw as an opportunity to pull the divided nation back from crisis. The president-elect sought a great deal of advice about the speech, but even his closest advisers were at odds over whether he should extend an olive branch to the South or fire a warning shot. Lincoln himself initially favored a strong, even confrontational message, stating that the Union would be preserved at all costs, that secession was illegal, and that he, as commander in chief, intended to enforce the law of the land. Toward that end, he planned to close the address with a ringing, provocative challenge: “In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war … With you, and not with me, is the solemn question of ‘Shall it be peace, or a sword?’”
    As Inauguration Day approached, however, Lincoln moderated the warlike tone, acting on the counsel of advisers such as William H. Seward, his designated secretary of state, to display “the magnanimity of a victor.” If the speech were delivered as originally drafted, Seward believed, both Virginia and Maryland would immediately secede, effectively cutting off Washington from the Northern states. “Every thought that we think ought to be conciliatory, forbearing and patient,” he insisted.
    Even as Lincoln revised and polished his address, however, there were many who felt that the moment for healing had passed. “Mr. Lincoln entered Washington the victim of a grave delusion,” said Horace Greeley, the famed publisher of the New-York Tribune. “His faith in reason as a moral force was so implicit that he did not cherish a doubt that his Inaugural