April 28, 1865. |
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| The Taylor building.2 |
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Southern powder and feel Southern steel,” 1 Mr. Lincoln added:--“Now, in my view of the present aspect of affairs, there need be no bloodshed or war. There is no necessity for it. I am not in favor of such a course; and I may say in advance, that there will be no bloodshed unless it be forced upon the Government, and then it will be compelled to act in self-defense.”
He had said the day before, at Trenton, “I shall do all that may be in my power to promote a peaceful settlement of all our difficulties.
The man does not live who is more devoted to peace than I am — no one who would do more to preserve it; but it may be necessary to put the foot down firmly.”
The declaration of Mr. Lincoln, that he was about to say that he would rather be assassinated than to give up the great principles of the rights of man embodied in the Declaration of Independence, came back to the ears of the American people like a terrible echo, a little more than four years afterward, when he was assassinated because he firmly upheld those principles; and in the very hall wherein they were first enunciated in the clear voice of Charles Thomson, reading from the manuscript of Thomas Jefferson, his lifeless body lay in state all through one Sabbath day,
that his face might be looked upon for the last time by a sorrowing people.
Perhaps the thought of assassination was in Mr. Lincoln's mind at that time, because he had been warned the night before that a band of men in Baltimore in the interest of the conspirators, and who held secret meetings in a room over a billiard and drinking saloon on Fayette Street, near Calvert, known as “The Taylor building,” had made preparations to take his life.
Before he left home, threats had found their way to the public ear that he would never reach Washington alive.
On the first
day of his journey an attempt was made to throw the railway train in which he was conveyed from the track; and just as he was about leaving Cincinnati, a hand-grenade was found secreted in the car in which he was to travel.
These and other suspicious circumstances had led to a thorough investigation, under the direction of a sagacious police detective.
It resulted in the discovery of the conspiracy at Baltimore, and the revelation of the fact, that a small number of assassins, led, it was said, by an Italian who assumed the name of Orsini,3 the would-be
1 See page 257.
2 this is from a sketch made in December, 1864. the front is of brown freestone. It is no. 66 Fayette Street. In this building, as we shall observe hereafter, the meetings of the Baltimore conspirators were held, to arrange for the attack on the Massachusetts troops, on the 19th of April, 1861.
3 History of the Administration of President Lincoln, by H. J. Raymond, page 109. A Baltimore correspondent of the New York Evening Post said that a notorious gambler of Baltimore, named. Byrne, who went to Richmond soon after the events in question, was arrested there on a charge of keeping a gambling-house, and of disloyalty to the “Southern Confederacy.” His loyalty was made apparent by the notorious Senator Wigfall, who testified that he “was captain of the gang who were to kill Mr. Lincoln.” This evidence of his complicity in the premeditated crime was sufficient to cover every other sin of which he was guilty, and he was discharged from custody.
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