The Hour of Peril: The Secret Plot to Murder Lincoln Before the Civil War by Daniel Stashower

Author:Daniel, Stashower, [Daniel, Stashower,]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2013-01-29T07:00:00+00:00

Baltimore’s police marshal George P. Kane, whose loyalties Pinkerton doubted. Courtesy of the Library of Congress

Marshal Kane had become a key figure in Baltimore’s effort to erase its “Mobtown” image. The previous year, a reform committee within the state legislature had enacted a bill to address the city’s “unchecked ruffianism,” and it had selected Kane to lead a newly revitalized police force. Kane was known to be a man of strong convictions as well as great personal courage. Years earlier, while on duty in Annapolis with his state militia unit, Kane had been called to the City Dock when fighting broke out between local townsmen and a group of “incorrigibles” aboard a Baltimore ship. Stones and bricks were thrown, and the matter soon escalated to the point where cannons were being readied to fire upon the ship. Kane and a pair of fellow officers coolly stepped forward and placed themselves at the mouths of the cannon to prevent the townsmen from firing. This display of unflinching bravery quieted the mob and defused the crisis.

By February 1861, Kane had been marshal of police for barely one year, but already he had made a dramatic impact. The new marshal, wrote one local journalist, “was perhaps the best man in the city for the task confided to him, and the new force organized by him, uniformed and thoroughly drilled, was the best and most efficient the city had ever known. Old abuses were done away with, and the citizens began to look back upon the period of ruffian rule as a terrible nightmare.”

With his reforms still in their early stages, however, Marshal Kane understood that the arrival of Abraham Lincoln in Baltimore would present a harsh test. Conscious of a possible eruption of violence, Kane had already made some questionable decisions. As the Baltimore American would report, members of the city’s Republican Committee—“a few hundred men, particularly obnoxious to the people and public sentiment of Baltimore”—were forming plans to greet the president-elect with a ceremonial procession from the Calvert Street Station. Although marches of this type were being staged in every other city on the Lincoln Special’s route, the Baltimore committee was well aware of local feeling against Lincoln and his supporters. Accordingly, they applied to Marshal Kane for police protection. In Kane’s view, a public display of this type was an invitation to disaster. “He advised against the proceeding,” the American noted, “assuring the parties that while Mr. Lincoln, in his passage through Baltimore, would be treated with respect due to him personally and to his high official position, there was no guarantee that the proposed procession would be similarly respected.” In fact, as Marshal Kane knew perfectly well, the procession was almost certain to be showered with rocks and rotten eggs, just as earlier Republican marches had been. Kane strongly advised the organizers to abandon their plan, “lest it might provoke some indignity which would involve the character of Baltimore and be very unpleasant to the President-elect.” Kane would even carry this argument down to Washington, where he discussed the matter with prominent Lincoln supporters.

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