The man with the gun spoke again: “There’s your proof. He’s not here. Now leave this train immediately!”
Smith studied the man. He was in his early twenties. Except for a thin mustache, his face was clean-shaven. His features were soft. He did not look like the sort of fellow who would pack a gun and protect a dignitary, but there was a steady determination in his gaze. Smith had no doubt the young man was willing to pull the trigger.
Smith still did not move. “Who are you?” he asked meekly.
“I am John Hay, secretary to Abraham Lincoln, who at this very moment is relaxing in Washington. He passed through Baltimore early this morning, in darkness. Now, back off or I will shoot!”
Smith retreated a step. The door slammed shut. Smith realized that he now stood on the back of the car with a single companion, the man he had recognized. The others who had followed him up the steps were gone. He looked at the mass of people surrounding the train. He heard voices up the track: “Lincoln is not on the train! He’s not on board!” Someone at the front of the car must have delivered the message, which spread quickly through the crowd.
Dozens of faces now turned to Smith, hoping he would contradict this report. But they saw a demoralized man. “It’s true,” he said. “Lincoln is not here.”
The catcalls started again. “Lincoln is a coward!” “He’s a sneak!” “He’s lucky he’s not here!”
Smith slumped his shoulders and looked at the man beside him.
“We have failed,” he said.
Then he stepped off the train and vanished into the mob. On the way out, he did not touch his gun.
TWO
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 25, 1861
Langston Bennett threw down his copy of the Charleston Mercury. The pages fluttered to the floor as Bennett balled his hands into fists. “Damn him!” he said, sharply but to himself. His anger crested and began to subside. Bennett could almost feel it flow from his body. That was how it always happened-a moment of lost control followed by a quick return to his senses. He let out a sigh, leaned back in his chair, and closed his eyes. He ran his fingers through the long gray hair that touched the collar of his shirt. “Something must be done,” he said in a low voice.
He opened a drawer in his desk and pulled out a blank sheet of paper. Instead of writing, he arched his back and gazed out the window in front of him, through the trees in Battery Park and across the harbor. He could see a couple of ships on the water. Farther to his left, at the harbor’s mouth more than two miles away, he spied a tiny flag flapping above the waves. His eyes narrowed and returned to the page on his desk. He dipped his pen in a small bottle and rattled it around. When he brought it to the top of the page, the pen made a short black mark and ran dry. Now Bennett frowned. He could not even write the first letter of the date. He put the pen down, reached for a bell on his desk, and rang it loudly.
Footsteps sounded on the staircase. The door opened and a tall black man walked in. His wrinkled face told of many years. Bennett remained seated.
“Lucius,” he said. “I’ve run out of ink. Please fetch me some.”
“Yessir.”
“Is there money in the till?”
“I think so.”
“Very well.”
Lucius bent down on one knee and began to pick up the newspaper pages scattered around Bennett’s feet.
“Thank you, Lucius. I became aggravated. That menace Lincoln slipped through Baltimore in the middle of the night on his way to Washington. So he has proven himself to be not only a villain but also a coward. I still have trouble believing this man will actually become president in a few days.”
Lucius could not read the Mercury, but he reassembled the pages and placed them on Bennett’s desk before leaving the room. Bennett thought about standing up, but it felt too good to stay seated. This was a sensation that he had started to feel more often, and it might have bothered him if he had actually let it. He was already an old man, having been born seventy-one years earlier-in 1789, the year George Washington was elected president for the first time. Bennett liked to joke that he was as old as the republic itself. That remark was once tinged with pride. When he made it nowadays, though, it sounded more like a complaint-partly because he really was getting old, but mostly because he had lost faith in the republic.
Looking again at the dot of a flag by the harbor’s mouth, he wished he had enough ink in his pen to blot it out: this was Fort Sumter, and inside it a company of men flew their banner in defiance of South Carolina. For two months, Bennett had glared at the flag every day. It was just a dash of color in the distance, but Bennett knew it displayed stars for South Carolina and six other states that had formally withdrawn from the Union. That flag must come down, he thought to himself. It will come down.
He could do nothing about it from the second story of his home and with no ink in his pen. He pushed back from the desk but did not rise to his feet. His leg ached-the left one. He reached down and rubbed it. Sometimes he still bristled when his hand touched the hard wood below his knee. His leg had become a stump fourteen years earlier, during the Mexican War. The surgeons told him it was a choice between his leg and his life, and before Bennett even had a chance to think about what they had said, they had sawed it off. He was glad they did, and he wore the peg like a badge. Many of the wounded men who returned from Mexico tried to hide their disfigurements, but not Bennett. He rolled up his trousers and exposed the peg for all to see.
The leg was a heavy price to pay for service in Mexico, but Bennett bore no regrets. He had bought himself a commission in the army, ready for an adventure. His wife had died many years earlier in childbirth, and his two sons were finally grown. Yet the war was not just a simple diversion for Bennett. The term “Manifest Destiny” had entered the public’s vocabulary, and Bennett believed in it. California and New Mexico belonged in the United States, not in a corrupt Mexico. But more important than any of this, the war would allow the expansion of slavery into new territories. To stay strong, the institution needed to grow. Many Northern politicians, especially those abolitionists in New England, opposed the war for exactly this reason. But the war came and went, with the United States acquiring vast new holdings and the slavery question put off for another day.
About this time, Bennett first encountered the name that now haunted him. The South Carolinian had returned to his plantation home to nurse his wounded limb. In newspapers, he read of a first-term member of Congress who charged the administration of President James Polk with illegal acts in starting the war. This upstart continued the assault for a month with speeches and amendments, and he backed off only when Polk’s treaty with Mexico ending the war arrived in the Senate for ratification. Bennett did not make much of the incident or of the congressman, who did not run for a second term. But he remembered the name. He knew for years that he did not like Abraham Lincoln.
He liked him even less after Lincoln became the Republican nominee for president-and then went on to win the election. Now Bennett was delighted to see the man humiliated. The Mercury carried a story about Lincoln’s craven arrival in Washington. Instead of taking the train through Baltimore at noon, as he had been scheduled to do, Lincoln passed through that city in the early morning, while it was still dark, and arrived in Washington at dawn. By the time a huge crowd had assembled at the depot in Baltimore, Lincoln was comfortably checked into a second-story suite at Willard’s, a hotel near the White House.