The First Assassin (3 page)

Bennett finally rose from his chair and walked to a globe resting on a pedestal nearby. The curving coastline of West Africa pointed up at him. He gently rotated the globe to his right, his eye following a line across the Atlantic Ocean until it reached the shore of South Carolina. The map marked the borders of each state. Presented this way, he thought, they looked like separate nations. As well they might be. South Carolina had formally seceded from the United States at the end of December. Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana had followed in January, and Texas had quit the Union on the first day of February. Just a week ago, Jefferson Davis was sworn in as president of the Confederacy in Montgomery, Alabama. Several other slaveholding states remained in the Union, but Bennett suspected that they would leave as well. If they did, the Confederacy would span from Maryland to Texas. It would be geographically larger than what remained of the so-called United States.

Now Bennett’s eye wandered farther south on the globe, to a long and narrow island in the Caribbean. Florida seemed to point like a finger at Cuba. Had things gone differently these past few years, perhaps it too would have been in the Confederacy. Or perhaps Cuba would be an actual state, with its admission to the Union delaying the conflict that was now erupting. President Buchanan had wanted to buy the island from Spain, but abolitionists in Congress stopped the purchase.

The island remained outside the American sphere of influence, and yet it was strangely close. Bennett, in fact, once had spent an entire winter there. He had even considered buying a sugar plantation but decided it was impractical to run from South Carolina. Even after that, he continued to correspond with some of the leading figures in Havana. He was able to do this in Spanish, having picked up the language during his time in Mexico. Bennett once had rated the Cuban episode of his life a grand waste of time, or at most a missed opportunity. Yet his letters to and from Cuba had increased tenfold since last fall. Now the time had come to send one more, which he believed would change the course of everything.

Bennett dipped his pen in the inkwell again and scrawled the date on the paper. He paused for a minute, trying to decide which words to use. Then he began: “
Estamado Señor, le solicito su ayada en un tema urgente
.” As Bennett formed these words on the page, he mumbled a translation to himself: “Dear Sir, I seek your service in an urgent matter…”

MONDAY, MARCH 4, 1861

The two men looked like hostages as they bumped down the street in an open carriage. Armed soldiers surrounded them on horseback. Troops marched in front and behind. Hundreds of spectators lined their path. Many of their faces were sullen, as if they were watching a foreign army seize control of the city. Shutters up and down Pennsylvania Avenue—or “the Avenue,” as the locals called it—were closed tight. Most of the onlookers were at least polite. A few even cheered. Yet this was not what Washington, D.C., had seen in years past. The procession seemed more like a military exercise than an inaugural parade.

The carriage riders exchanged few words along the way. Their silence would have felt awkward were it not invaded by shouts from the crowd and the clattering hooves of horses. The men had met only once before, and they had had little to say to each other then. Now there was practically nothing at all. Both welcomed the steady stream of noise that filled the space between them. It provided a convenient excuse for avoiding conversation.

The pudgy, older man was James Buchanan, the outgoing president. A shock of his white hair bounced whenever the carriage hit a hole in the street, which it did every few feet. The jolts also made him grimace, but he looked more pitiful than menacing. He could barely see out of one of his eyes, a debility that forced him to squint constantly. In fact, he appeared a bit disoriented, as if he did not understand why he and the fellow seated beside him were the center of so much attention. Some of his critics would have considered this a fitting summary of his whole dithering presidency. Buchanan himself mostly felt relief. In recent weeks he had wanted nothing as badly as this day to come, and with it the lifting of a burden he believed he could no longer bear. He wanted to be done with the responsibility of the presidency. His thoughts now were focused on Wheatland, his home in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He would plant flowers soon.

His companion kept a somber look, occasionally broken by a quick smirk or a slight wave. His crumpled face was not handsome, but it was distinctive. One glimpse and it was hard to forget, with deep-set eyes, a high forehead, and a big nose. The beard was new. He had only recently grown it. People accustomed to his face from pictures were not used to the new look. It made him appear older and more serious. Perhaps that was the point. All of this was set atop a tall and spindly frame. Many of his features seemed out of proportion, and a black stovepipe hat exaggerated his considerable height even further. It might be said that a good caricature resembles its subject. Abraham Lincoln, on the other hand, was a subject who resembled a caricature.

Colonel Charles P. Rook rode on a horse alongside the carriage, dressed in his blue uniform. His thoughts kept returning to a single question, which he could not chase from his head: would he take a bullet for Lincoln? Rook was riding with the president-elect for the specific purpose of protecting him. The other horsemen surrounding Lincoln were under his command, and he had planned all the security arrangements along the inaugural route, as well as at the Capitol, where Lincoln would give a speech and be sworn in. At Eleventh Street, Rook looked up and saw sharpshooters peering down from the rooftops of buildings facing the Avenue. They held Sharps rifles and had orders to use them if necessary. When he passed Tenth Street, he checked for the mounted soldiers who were there, just up from the intersection and ready to charge should the need arise. And in the crowd, mixed among the parade watchers, he sometimes spotted a familiar face—an undercover agent, keeping tabs on the people around him. Rook had planned it all.

The only thing he had not planned was the weather. It had rained lightly at sunrise, but unfortunately not enough to dampen the dust on the Avenue. At least the air was crisp and cool, a welcome change from the unusual warmth of the last several days. Rook figured this would keep his men more alert, rather than tempt them into sluggishness. He worried that a loss of concentration for even a moment, somewhere along this path, would give an assassin the small opening he needed. If a gunman were to pop his head from a second-story window on the south side of the Avenue, it was possible that only Rook’s flesh would prevent Lincoln’s death.

Rumors of conspiracy had run around the capital ever since Lincoln’s election sparked the secession crisis. Opinion in Washington was split between those who supported Lincoln and thought the South was in the midst of a grand bluff, and those who truly hated the president-elect. There was no middle ground.

Rook was from Kentucky, and soldiering came naturally to him. His ancestors had fought in the American Revolution and the War of 1812. He had graduated from West Point in 1845, and within two years found himself fighting for his country in Mexico. He landed with the invasion force at Veracruz in 1847. On the march to Mexico City, Rook won brevets at the battles of Molino del Rey and Chapultepec. His military career was off to a brilliant start.

Then he quit. He discovered that when there was no war to fight, life in the military was unrewarding and the pay too low. He tried banking, but that failed when his treasurer ran off with most of their money. Then he went into surveying. The never-ending travel had prevented Rook from finding a wife. Most men of his age had a family. Rook, some said, was married to whatever job he held at the time.

He happened to be in Washington a few days after South Carolina seceded, when Lieutenant General Winfield Scott learned of his presence. The two men knew each other from Mexico. They discussed the national crisis and the particular threat to the District of Columbia, nestled between two slave states. They also considered the safety of the incoming president. After a time, the old general announced that he had a meeting with President Buchanan. Rook walked him down to his carriage. At the door, Scott paused.

“Our most immediate problem is that many of the citizens of the District of Columbia would like to defend the government and their next president—but they have no rallying point. There is nothing to bring them together.”

“What may be done?” asked Rook.

“Make yourself that rallying point,” Scott replied, stepping outside the door and into his carriage. From the vehicle, Rook heard him repeat his words: “Make yourself that rallying point!”

Three days later, Rook was mustered back into military service with the job of organizing the District’s security and protecting the president-elect. It felt good to be back in uniform. Unlike some military men, Rook was far from vain about his appearance. He took a small measure of pride in a neatly trimmed beard that came to a sharp point below his chin, as if it had been chiseled into shape. Overall, however, he displayed the slightly rumpled appearance of a man who felt most at home in a field camp.

For the past two months, Rook had worked tirelessly to ensure that Abraham Lincoln would survive until this day. Yet Rook did not care much for Lincoln. His candidate in the election had been Stephen Douglas, the Democratic senator from Illinois. Douglas actually had defeated Lincoln in a Senate race just two years earlier, in a contest that the whole nation had watched. Rook did not believe Lincoln was the best choice to lead the country—and he was not sure that Lincoln was even a good choice. He worried that the abolitionists behind his rapid ascent did not have the interests of the Union in mind. They were blind advocates of a radical cause, no better than the fire-eaters of the South who now committed treason. Had their positions been reversed and the South pressed its views on the North, Rook believed it was the abolitionists who would be seceding. He wished both sides would keep the nation’s interests in mind rather than flirt with a deadly conflict.

Rook had suggested holding the inauguration indoors. Lincoln, however, rejected the proposal. The open-air inauguration had become a habit ever since the British had burned the Capitol in the War of 1812 and forced the ceremony outside. The president-elect also turned down Rook’s recommendation that he stay in a private house rather than a public hotel like Willard’s. His experience in Baltimore probably explained it. Lincoln wanted to avoid another embarrassment.

From his first days in Washington, Lincoln had made clear his distaste for security. He told Scott that he did not want to be accompanied by thugs everywhere he went, like a dictator whose own people despised him. Rook had been forced to post plainclothes agents at Willard’s because Lincoln would not permit an overabundance of men in uniform. The president-elect, in fact, probably did not realize how many men Rook had sent there to guard him—there were about half a dozen at any one time, and occasionally there were more. The hotel was constantly packed with job seekers and other creatures of patronage, so Rook’s men were barely noticed. But a careful observer would have detected them there, day after day. Scott and Rook had not bothered to ask about the inaugural escort. They simply informed Lincoln of their plans and let him assume that they had been made under Buchanan’s direction, even though this was not true.

As Rook crossed Seventh Street, he looked over his shoulder. The entourage had journeyed half a mile since starting at the president’s mansion, where it had picked up Buchanan at noon, and then made a short stop at Willard’s to get Lincoln. Rook couldn’t see the White House—the Treasury Department stood in the way—but he marked his progress. Seventh Street was the midpoint, roughly. The Center Market was there, a big building full of grocers and fish-sellers. Behind it lay the seamiest part of the city, south of the Avenue. Some people called it Murder Bay. Rook thought that this might very well have been the most treacherous part of the trip, and he was glad to have it behind him.

Getting this far had taken long enough. Rook wished he could have hurried the carriage from one place to the next with more speed. Somebody once called Washington “a city of magnificent distances.” Rook did not consider the distances so magnificent. The city seemed empty and incomplete even when it was full of people, as it was today. He could only imagine what it was like during the summer, when the politicians and all the hangers-on were absent. It must seem like an abandoned village or a ghost town, he thought. In the meantime, he was concerned that the man he was supposed to protect was exposed, an easy target for someone taking advantage of Washington’s wide-open spaces.

Now he looked up the Avenue, over the heads of the marching men in front of him, and on to his destination: the Capitol. The building’s original dome was gone. A new one was rising in its place, slowly. Iron girders bent upward, looking like the ribs of a carcass. They hinted at the dome’s eventual shape, but a large crane right in the middle towered over everything and made plain that this was a work in progress. Rook wondered if it would ever really be done. West of the Capitol, the Washington Monument also lay incomplete. The main difference was that nobody had worked on it in six years. The subscription meant to fund this memorial had run out of money with the obelisk only one-third its intended height. Now it just sat there, dwarf-like and ignored. So much of the nation’s business was unfinished, thought Rook, and yet the country now tottered closer to collapse than completion.

The presidential carriage banged over a big rut, rattling Buchanan and Lincoln and causing Rook to tense at the sound. It would be nice if they finished the Capitol dome and the Washington Monument, thought Rook, but right now he’d settle for fixing the Avenue. No European capital would allow its streets to deteriorate so badly. Lincoln caught Rook’s eye and smiled as he reached up and adjusted his tall black hat.

As he looked away from the next president, Rook’s mind returned to the question he had asked himself all along the inaugural route: would he really put himself between Lincoln and a killer? So many others had decided they would not even serve under the man. Over the last two months, he had seen many of his fellow soldiers leave the army. Every day seemed to bring a new name. Most had departed for the South. Was it possible that one of them had stayed behind, plotting the ultimate treachery?

Scott and Rook had set in motion a security plan for the inauguration that would be difficult to betray: all of their subordinates knew only their own orders, not those of others. Rook felt he had guarded against some of the more outlandish rumors that had been circulating around the city, such as the suggestion that Lincoln and his cabinet would be kidnapped and smuggled to the Confederacy. He took every precaution he could imagine. Just twelve hours earlier, he had found himself racing down the Avenue in darkness to investigate a report that someone had planted explosives beneath the east portico of the Capitol, where Lincoln soon would appear. His search turned up nothing, but he posted a soldier on the spot. At daybreak, another dozen soldiers reinforced him. The colonel wanted no surprises.

As the entourage crossed Sixth Street, Rook looked at Brown’s Hotel, on his left. This was a headquarters of secessionist sympathy. Southern politicians lived here when Congress was in session. Now they were gone, having abandoned the city in droves over the last several weeks. Still, the hotel was full, just like every place of lodging in the city. When Rook looked into the crowd along the Avenue, he could not fail to notice the large number of carpetbags. Hundreds of people visiting the city simply had nowhere to stay.

Fourth Street came and went, then Third Street, the site of the Washington Hotel and the St. Charles Hotel. After these landmarks, the crowds dwindled. At First Street, the parade found itself at the foot of Capitol Hill, which was really more of a slight rise on a flat landscape than something deserving the honorific of “Hill.” It was as if the politicians who worked atop its low summit could not resist exaggerating even this simple fact of geography. Rook felt safer near the grounds of the Capitol, where there were fewer buildings to hide conspirators. In the distance, he saw a few pieces of light artillery—an extravagant gesture, he thought, but one that Scott himself had insisted upon in case there was actually an organized attack on the new president.

The procession now turned off the Avenue and circled to the left. Minutes later, the presidential carriage halted on the north side of the Capitol, where a temporary covered passage protruded about one hundred feet from a doorway leading into the building. Lincoln had barely stepped off the vehicle before Buchanan offered him his arm, and then they were hustled down this corridor. Rook waited for them to disappear. Then he dismounted and entered the Capitol himself.