Baltimore Plot
The Baltimore Plot were alleged conspiracies in February 1861 to assassinate President-elect Abraham Lincoln during a whistle-stop tour en route to his inauguration.
[5] Allan Pinkerton was commissioned by the railroad's president, Samuel M. Felton, to provide security for the president-elect on his journey to Washington, D.C.[7][8] The only north-south rail line to Washington was through Baltimore,[9] making it necessary for Lincoln to cross Maryland to reach the capital, therefore potentially dangerous for the Republican president-elect to pass through a city in which he received only two percent of the vote,[10] and through a state in which he received "fewer than 2,300 votes".
[11] The incoming Republican government was not about to take risks, and later that year Lincoln would suspend many civil liberties, even ordering the arrest of Maryland's state legislature for fear it might vote for secession.
[12] Pinkerton, in particular, was extremely cautious, which he would demonstrate during the coming war, when he repeatedly overestimated Confederate strength and negatively influenced Union Army policy.
[3] On February 11, 1861, President-elect Lincoln boarded an eastbound train in Springfield, Illinois, at the start of a whistle-stop tour of 70 towns and cities,[13][14] ending with his inauguration in Washington, D.C. Allan Pinkerton, head of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, had been hired by railroad officials to investigate suspicious activities and acts of destruction of railroad property along Lincoln's route through Baltimore.
This included an investigation of Corsican hairdresser Cipriano Ferrandini, a well-established barber at Baltimore's Barnum's Hotel, and president of the pro-Confederate National Volunteers.
[16][4][6] While only reports from Pinkerton's operatives tied Ferrandini to the assassination conspiracy, he traveled to Mexico in 1860 to "train with a secessionist militia" and met Jerome N. Bonaparte and Thomas Winans, two individuals in the high society of Baltimore who had Confederate sympathies.
[16] Another Pinkerton operative, Timothy Webster, learned about a secret league from Baltimore which had planned on destroying railroad bridges and telegraph wires and killing Lincoln.
Other individuals, such as Senator William Seward and New York City police detective David S. Bookstaver drew similar conclusions to Pinkerton, while a congressional select committee also investigated the threat by Ferrandini.
[20] Pinkerton agents also investigated another secret society, the Knights of the Golden Circle, a White supremacist organization, which planned to create "a new nation dominated by slavery," encompassing the American South, Mexico, and the Caribbean region.
He argued that the list of subjects from Pinkerton lacked any influential individuals, even though Thomas Holliday Hicks, then the Governor of Maryland had called on Lincoln and his entourage to be killed by some "good men".
[47] George William Brown, then the mayor of Baltimore, wrote in his memoir of the event that he was not disloyal and described the plot exaggerated, sensational and imagined.
[50] There actually was an NYPD officer, John Alexander Kennedy, who claimed to have been the one to uncover the Baltimore Plot,[51][52] but unlike Powell's movie character, he was not actually on the scene.
The episode was criticized by author Mark S. Reinhart as historically inaccurate, "too ridiculous" even for Time Tunnel, a set which looks more like a town in the Wild West than Baltimore, and "tedious viewing" for Lincolnphiles.
