Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [203]
Lincoln again revealed his strength of will in his short address at the Astor Hotel in New York City. While he opened with a conciliatory tone, promising that he would never of his own volition “consent to the destruction of this Union,” he qualified his promise with “unless it were to be that thing for which the Union itself was made.” Two days later, speaking in Independence Hall in Philadelphia, he clarified what he meant by those portentous words. Moved by a keen awareness that he was speaking in the hall where the Declaration of Independence was adopted, he asserted that he had “never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration…. It was not the mere matter of the separation of the colonies from the mother land; but something in that Declaration” that provided “hope to the world for all future time. It was that which gave promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance.” If the Union could “be saved upon that basis,” he would be among “the happiest men in the world”; but if it “cannot be saved without giving up that principle,” he maintained, he “would rather be assassinated on this spot than to surrender it.”
Lincoln’s ominous mention of assassination may have been prompted by the previous day’s report of a plot to kill him during his scheduled stop in Baltimore, a city rampant with Southern sympathizers. Lincoln first received word of the plot through the detective Allan Pinkerton, responsible for guarding him on the trip, who advised him to leave Philadelphia at once and pass through Baltimore on a night train ahead of schedule to confound the conspirators. “This,” according to Ward Lamon, who accompanied Lincoln on the trip, “he flatly refused to do. He had engagements with the people, he said, to raise a flag over Independence Hall in the morning, and to exhibit himself at Harrisburg in the afternoon.”
That same afternoon, Seward’s son Fred was in the Senate gallery when a page summoned him to speak with his father at once. Meeting in the lobby, Seward handed Fred a note from General Winfield Scott carrying a similar warning of trouble in Baltimore. “I want you to go by the first train,” Seward directed his son. “Find Mr. Lincoln, wherever he is. Let no one else know your errand.” Fred immediately boarded a train and arrived at the Continental Hotel in Philadelphia, where Lincoln was staying, after ten that night.
“I found Chestnut street crowded with people, gay with lights, and echoing with music and hurrahs,” Fred recalled. Lincoln was encircled by people, and Fred was forced to wait several hours to deliver his message. “After a few words of friendly greeting with inquiries about my father and matters in Washington,” Fred remembered, “he sat down by the table under the gas-light to peruse the letter I had brought.” After a few moments, Lincoln spoke: “If different persons, not knowing of each other’s work, have been pursuing separate clews that led to the same result, why then it shows there may be something in it. But if this is only the same story, filtered through two channels, and reaching me in two ways, then that don’t make it any stronger. Don’t you see?” Then, Fred related, “noticing that I looked disappointed at his reluctance to regard the warning, he said kindly: ‘You need not think I will not consider it well. I shall think it over carefully, and try to decide it right; and I will let you know in the morning.’”
The next morning, Lincoln agreed to leave Philadelphia for Washington on the night train as soon as his engagement in Harrisburg was completed. Pinkerton insisted, against Mary’s judgment, that she and the boys should remain behind and travel to Washington in the afternoon as scheduled. Wearing a felt hat in place of his familiar stovepipe, Lincoln secretly boarded a special car on the night train, accompanied by Ward Lamon and Detective Pinkerton. All other trains were