to such publications as the washington post and the new yorker and well as the new york times for the times he edited the collection of online civil war cesquare centennial essays called disunion. and just two weeks ago. he wrote a beautiful times op-ed essay on the indirect number between james buchanan and abraham lincoln in 1860 and 1861. that op-ed was drawn from his new book lincoln on the verge 13 days to washington, which you i hope you see over one of my shoulders. i this one i'm not gonna try to guess which one that is. it's a riveting account of the great succession winter. focusing not only on lincoln but on his surroundings. kind of a railroad passenger. i view of the north as lincoln slowly made his way from springfield and washington to become the most looked at president in american history up to that time. so it ted i'm going to lead the conversation and then in around. at around 11 11 15. we will we will go to the q&a, but we'll have a good long tongue time to talk. and i guess the obvious question which we alluded to a few minutes ago is picture us in the midst of a presidential transition that feels different because a big block says the election is illegitimate. there are threats coming out from demonstrators. there's anger. those indignation and of course i'm talking about 1860. not anything else you might imagine. so what can we learn? from abraham lincoln and indeed from james buchanan if there was to learn about transitions well, i should begin by saying i did not anticipate 2016 or 2020 when i started this book. so it was 2011. and as you mentioned i was deeply involved in the disunion project of the new york times, which you participated in. and many people on this call. i bet participated in as writers and and so as readers and so we were just trying to reach new audiences through new tools the internet until good until good history online. and so 2016 was five years away and barack obama was actually still in his first. term but even then there was a feeling that there were two very different americas and that that feeling has deepened a lot since 2011 2012, but that there there were people who didn't like each other and that's a feature of all of american history, but it was crystallizing in some very ugly ways into a non-acceptance of the other side's right to govern and i believe the birtherism was already happening in 2011. and you know, that wasn't something i was paying that much attention to but in retrospect it was important it was a significant number of americans denying the right of someone to someone who had clearly been elected to be the president. and so as i wrote this book over nine years that was an important part of the beginning of the book is the the shock of the election of lincoln in 1860 shock among many northerners as well as southerners shock that a person who a year earlier was relatively unknown to all northerners despite the lincoln douglas debates that he had actually managed to win over much more famous rivals for the nomination and then a different kind of shock spreading out across the south after the news of the election had settled in which was seething anger preparations for war if it came to that and and for secession and really a lot of just incredulity of feeling expressed in newspapers and in correspondence that this could not have happened and if we just pretend that it didn't happen, maybe the whole thing will will go away. and as you describe in lincoln president-elect, there were a lot of people exploring. alternative solutions the son of alexander hamilton is wondering if northern and southern delegations might sort of rethink their electoral votes and and put it into the house of representatives for a new vote. which had happened it had happened in 1824 that the house took over the right to pick the president. and there are plans that seem wacky now but they were really talked about very seriously about maybe a three-part presidency with the south represented in some new kind of presidency to come and new york city in its mayor. fernando wood is flirting with some kind of non-participation in lincoln's government. that was a model that was known to exist in europe. a lot of the former hanseatic cities of germany like hamburg and bremen with self-governing mechanisms, and and so, you know the wasn't at all certain that the constitution. and the idea of all these states participating in a single government led by a president of the united states. it wasn't at all certain that that would survive the the transition and we're seeing a whole lot of that today. so we're now 11 days after the election. there will be a major demonstration in washington dc today by trump's supporters who are saying stop the steal. apparently a lot of that is being driven by roger stone who's sentence was recently commuted by president trump. and so there is the same feeling that there are two realities in conflict. there are a whole lot of trump supporters. who do not believe that he lost the election in also believe there are a lot of legitimate ways that he can fight back whether in the courts. it's not going very well for him. or i hope i hope it doesn't come to this but through increasingly belligerent tactics. standing near state capitals on the days that electoral votes are going to be counted and certified. and just sort of standing. aggressively on sidewalks in southern towns western towns much as they were doing in the fall and winter of 1860 and 61 so we don't quite know the end of this story yet. you know, i i was reminded when you save your answer that when i did president-elect. i decided well, of course, we know that there was a threat against the reading of the electoral votes on february 12th. i guess it was. lincoln's birthday. um, he was in columbus, ohio and it been rumored that. they would be a kind of a demonstration from the senate gallery. of course the vice president southerner who had lost the election had to read the results much like al gore did in a right 2000 but i think the advantage of the electors themselves didn't go i like the of electors staying home. not causing a tumble. they they met in their states. as i track the springfield vote where everybody voted for lincoln and then they met in their states as i tracked the springfield vote where everybody voted for lincoln, and then they just said i've examined -- i don't know if you had a chance to look at this in the national archives. there are actual envelopes, each one is sealed with a wax seal. they're the very ones breckenridge opened and faithfully read aloud. >> wow. >> yeah. >> i'm so impressed you've seen them. i emailed someone at the archives, and she sent me an image of ohio's, so i've only seen one. i'd love to see the seal. >> the seals, yeah, they're all -- they sent one by mail with a wax seal and sent one with a messenger, but since they were not sure that the messenger would not disappear somewhere, they also mailed them. >> wow. >> another analog i just thought of that i hadn't thought of, but lincoln, who rarely spoke about his personal life and his disappointments and sufferings did mention the death of his younger son and the fact that he was buried in springfield when he left springfield. >> that's right. and there is something of a comparison to the fact that joe biden has already twice visited the cemetery where was buried. >> that's a really good observation. >> just a quick story, yeah, quick story, when sam waterston and i performed a piece called lincoln seen and heard for president george h.w. bush in texas years ago, he came backstage afterwards with tears in his eyes, and we asked him -- we did this before several presidents over a period of time. we asked him what moved him the most about the speeches that waterston had read. we thought he would say the gettysburg address or the second inaugural as everyone does invariably. and he said the springfield -- the departure from springfield, the farewell address. really, we said? why? and he began to cry. and he said because no one knows what it's like to leave your home to become president and leave the grave of your child behind. >> wow. that's an amazing story, harold. >> ted, this is as good a time as any to ask you could have done any number of projects when you started this book, and you chose to do this, so why did you decide to do it? >> well, part of the answer is a lifelong fascination with lincoln that i'm sure i share with every person on this call. oh, and i want to thank my fellow rhode islanders, chief justice frank williams and ed acorn who wrote a beautiful book about lincoln's second inaugural that i strongly urge everyone to read. he may not technically be a rhode islander, he lives about one or two miles over the border and we're very conscious of borders in rhode island because we have so little land, but anyway, it's nice to be a part of the lincoln community in rhode island. so i grew up in rhode island, and i read the kinds of childhood biographies for young americans that many of us, i suspect, devoured, fourth, fifth grade, and i read a book by a woman named augusta stevenson, it was part of a childhood series of -- for 10-year-olds, 12-year-olds, and it got me hooked on lincoln at a young age. and like you, i had lincoln paraphernalia on the walls of my room growing up, but i never -- you know, he's intimidating. i never dared to write about him. i did do a couple 19th century books. i was part of a series of short presidential biographies and i got martin van buren, and there is one memorable encounter between van buren and lincoln in the early 1840s that i described in my van buren book. but then a lot of years went by, and i became a white house speech writer, somewhat to my surprise. i was already mainly an academic, and yet, i was doing a little bit of freelance journalism, so i was a writer with several different voices. i was always fighting a little bit against my academic voice, and i'm happy to say i think that i finally with this book was able to tell more of a story and less of an academic history, which not everyone wants to do that, but i did want to do that, and it took me a long time to figure out how to do that. and the way that happened was the disunion series we were talking about, that was the brain child of a couple young editors at the "new york times" who were given some permission from the senior editors of the paper to explore new content ideas online because back then around 2010, '11, the online paper was like the minor leagues. it wasn't as important as the printed paper. now it has almost become the opposite. i still get the daily "new york times," but most of us get it in our phones and our laptops and we're checking it all day long. so they got permission to do a history feature, and they decided they wanted to do the beginnings of the civil war. it was only scheduled to be six months. it ended up going 40 years. they covered the entirety of the war, but in the early months, they just wrote to a couple historians they knew, and i happened to know them socially. i'd done a couple op-eds for the times, but they certainly did not write to me for my distinction as a lincoln person. they did write to you for your distinction as a lincoln person. but i helped them. i helped them find adam goodhart who many of you will know for his book "1861." he had finished the writing of that book, but it was not yet published so he was the perfect kind of lead stalking horse to write a lot of essays in a six-month period from november 2010 to april 2011 covering the time from lincoln's election to fort sumter, about 150 years ago, and we began thinking it would be about what happened on this day 150 years ago. that was the conceit. we later got away from that because there were so many good historians who just wanted to write in on what was on their minds, and flood began to come in of great writing, ask so i was a little bit involved as an editor, then more involved as a writer, and i in late february began to -- i'm sorry, early february began to follow lincoln's train ride, and that felt great. i'm sure you've had this feeling and many people out there, that we do some projects out of a sense of duty, and then others just become fun, and this had a feeling of fun from the very beginning. fun and danger, i should add, because of the assassination plot in baltimore. so i really put a lot into the writing of my 13 posts, and so only 13 days went by, and i'd written the backbone of this book, and then it took me nine years to finish it. so go figure how i had almost finished it in half a month and then it took me nine years to actually complete it. but writing it online helped keep it loose and flowing and less didactic than my earlier academic work, so i think that helped me a lot. >> interesting. my old boss in politics, mario cuomo was a great advocate for writing outlines before you submitted speeches, and you've just told us the way that you constructed an outline, even if you did it publicly, around which -- >> right, exactly. >> -- you could layer the book. so lincoln had been silent for really, except for kind of an accidental talk at the state fair, he was silent from the cooper union new england tour, even managed to get to providence, right? >> yeah. >> and until february 11th, 1861, really a year of silence, and he always said -- he said at gettysburg, we always say this when we meet, he liked to avoid saying foolish things. he did not trust himself to speak extemporaneously. as great a jury summarizer we know he was, and we know he prepared some speeches in springfield to deliver along the route at state capitals and such, but he made 100 speeches along the route. did he gain confidence in his ability to say just the right few things? how do you account for the -- you know, the extravagant number of talks that he was willing to do after so many months of saying nothing? >> well, that's one of the great dramas of the book for me. i mean, part of it is just looking out the window at america. part of it is this sense of encroaching danger as lincoln goes into the seat of danger as baltimore was called, and then washington was also pretty dangerous, but then there is this feeling of a personal journey of a fair amount of growth for lincoln over only 13 days. as you said, he'd hardly spoken at all, except for that accidental speech in springfield when mainly he said he didn't want to speak. that was the thrust of his message, and it's a great paradox that this greatest orator in american history is silent throughout his nomination and campaign and then the weeks after his victory, and his silence was held against him, as you know very well, and people thought he was inarticulate and a kind of small town lawyer with nothing of great interest to say to anyone. but being the punk tills you person that he was, he's writing out longhand speeches, one per day. usually the speech he would give in a state capitol inside the legislature of a statehouse, so those were serious moments where he's speaking to the elected representatives of a state, that was a very important ritual for an incoming president-elect, including for the reason that he might need governors to call up troops if washington were either attacked or if he needed to raise an army to compel the south to come back into the country. but then as soon as -- within minutes of leaving springfield after delivering the incredible farewell address, it is clear that the minute to minute reality of a train journey requires him to go out all the time and say a few words to people gathered on the side of the track, either, you know, a crossroads in farm country, we went through a lot of farm country, or in a small town where invariably the largest crowd that had ever assembled in a small town would be there requiring a few minutes of a talk or then a large city like indianapolis or cincinnati or columbus where he really had to give a significant kind of a speech, or especially as he's going along the ohio river and can see kentucky on the other side. so these are fairly fraught moments of political theater, which he really had to think through. and in general, he did extremely well. there were a couple flubs. he had a kind of a flub in indianapolis his first night when he gave a kind of funny but undignified speech about how the south's theory of union was like a free love match between a man who didn't really want to marry a woman he was sleeping with basically, and then a couple other speeches that didn't really hit their mark all that well. a boring economic speech in pittsburgh in the rain. but overwhelmingly, he was finding his footing. he was funny as he was before juries. he could be profound. he often spoke movingly about where he was including looking over the ohio at the south, at the state where he was born, or seeing veterans gathered near cleveland, he's seeing veterans of the war of 1812, and then as he comes closer to philadelphia beginning in trenton, new jersey, and then in philadelphia, he talks with great beauty and grace and historical insight, and some personal memory of his childhood, which as you know, the small amounts we ever get we cherish because he spoke so little about the person he was as a pretty unlettered and impoverished youth. so at the end of the trip, he's talking about what the american revolution meant to him when he was a childhood reader of history. and then giving these beautiful remarks in and next to independence hall that, to me, foreshadow what he will say in the same state two years later at gettysburg. >> yeah, i agree with you that something about being in the sights of revolution animate him. >> yeah. >> i wish i could say he was equally adroit in albany. he did okay in a hostile place, but how seriously -- just a quick question, how seriously do you take his rumblings about going -- making a stop in what he called the place of my nativity, which is either amusing or arrogant, i'm not sure which, kentucky. do you think he ever really contemplated doing that? >> you know, i never thought about that until this second, but that's a really precise, perceptive observation. using the word nativity is kind of a charged word. >> yeah, i think so. >> especially for someone who was so compared to jesus after his martyrdom. that's interesting, harold. well, we have that letter in 1860 where he expresses his -- you know, wondering whether he could even go into kentucky for fear of being lynched. he did write out longhand, it's in his manuscripts at the library of congress an undelivered speech to kentuckyians. it's very interesting. he gave some of it in his trackside remarks along the ohio and southern indiana and then southern ohio and says aloud what he would say to kentuckyians and he would say to them you are as good as we are and we would be much the same as you if in your circumstances, so he's got a good message to the south. it's a message curiously similar to the one joe biden is saying a lot right now, which is i want to be a president for all americans and just respect everybody's rights. i think by the time the train trip is underway, there's no great expectation he will go into kentucky, including for the fact that as i found in -- well, i was about to say i wasted except i don't think it was a waste, but i dawdled for at least a year of my nine years doing intricate railroad research probably of small interest to lincoln biographers. but i was interested in where the routes actually went and were there options to go into the south, and there were very few. it was hard to get off a northern train and get into the south. >> please don't think that you wasted our time because all of that stuff was so new to me and vivid, so i will -- i have seared in my mind the image of one of lincoln's trains in the dead of winter going downhill with the brakes on on an icy leaf strewn track. that was a pretty scary -- you wrote that so beautifully. >> it was. into pittsburgh, yeah. >> yeah. so actually, i think -- i think his speeches were -- the formal speeches. i agree with you that the tariff speech is boring, but at least it shores up some of his base along the way. >> that's for sure. >> immigrant and the big tariff guys, and i think the free love thing was subtler than some people give, acknowledge, because people had charged that antislavery people were also proponents of free love, said they were free love advocates. if you look at the period cartoons, you see women who advocate free love with black people and abolitionists, when he turns it on disunionists, i think that's kind of -- >> that's really a good point. >> may be silly and frivolous, but i think he was making -- he was making a point. so i'm going to leave the last 15 minutes to talk about the assassination plot. we have a little bit of time before. so ted, this is a hard one, bu i'm going to ask you to put yourself in lincoln's head for a minute, and i'm going to resite recite a number of goals for the trip, i want to know if you agree and if you'd choose one as his principal goal and tell me if i've left any out here. so his chief goals en route to washington, getting to washington alive, nipping succession in the bud, winning over northerners who hadn't voted for him, principally democrats, introducing himself to people who didn't know him or all of the above or something else. >> that's pretty comprehensive, harold. that's very good. i might add one that became extremely important to me, and i'm a little embarrassed to talk about it as i think he was, but i also think it's important and it's suddenly i would say in the airing in 2022, which was sprinkling over his listeners a kind of mystical attachment to the union, to the idea of american history as something very special that had happened in human history, and we -- we also know that lincoln was the first to poke fun at himself and had a side of him that was anecdotal and even, you know, kind of coarse in certain ways, but there was also something quasi mystical and spiritual in him which seward observed -- there was a nice comment, i think seward might have said it to the adams family where he often went to dinner that there was a kind of spiritual quality or mystical, i can't remember the exact word, to lincoln's attachment to the union which may be his greatest attribute. and i think alexander stevens said something like that, too, and you and i have emailed a bit, really interested in their friendship, their friendship and rivalry. but lincoln is -- to further all the goals you just mentioned including winning over democrats in the north and keeping border states extremely important, and by the way, over the course of writing this book, felt that it was incredibly important that virginia had not yet succeeded by the time -- virginia even more than kentucky, missouri, and maryland. it was really important that the state of precedence was still part of the united states when he was inaugurated but that to further all of those goals, retelling the history -- and he's a master reteller, and that might be the right word because there were a lot of floating competitive ideas of american history. you know, we're all in the history business, we all retell it all the time, and we're seeing a really interesting retelling over the last two years with the 1619 project and donald trump's attempt to come back with the 1776 commission, and for most of us we're wondering where we fit in in this landscape of competing narratives and lincoln was also putting out a compeing narrative, and throughout the 1850s, the south had every year minimized the declaration of independence a little bit more as a document that was no longer convenient to their way of looking at things. and lincoln is lifting it up more and more and more even before the lincoln douglas debates and then very much during the debates, and then it just keeps coming out. and so it's not there at the beginning of this train trip, but it really is there at the end, and it's really there at gettysburg. so i think this mystical attachment to the union, which may have been something he developed as a, you know, 8-year-old reading, talking with people out in the -- you know, on the frontier in southern indiana, but something that was above and beyond a normal grasp of american history and the facts was a love of the idea of equality expressed in jefferson's second paragraph of the declaration. >> i love that you also mentioned the retelling aspect of it. he was not originating the story because when people came to him during his presidency and asked things like mr. president, how do you -- how do you write all these amazing stories and jokes? and he said, well, i'm not a humorist, i'm a retailer of other people's. >> oh, that's great. >> so he was a retailer of the union story and humor and reverence for the union were sort of part of his complex character. >> right. >> you mentioned early, and we don't -- we don't dwell on current events at the forum, although we have to acknowledge the reality, and you mentioned the demonstrations that will be occurring today to give a contrary view or to suggest a contrary view to the election results, i mea contrary to reality, but abraham lincoln had to contend with something quite different, so during his inaugural journey, there was a counter inaugural journey by jefferson davis. and do we have any record of whether he -- i mean, you have poured through all of the newspapers much more than i ever will did, small town papers and such. are there references in northern papers about this other inaugural journey? >> yes, there are. what i really wanted to get i failed to get, which were the words of speeches jefferson davis was giving. it's really hard to forget those, but the telegraph was sending reports that, you know, he's in northern alabama tonight or he's going to be in atlanta tomorrow night, so they knew where he was, and they did get the words of his inaugural address in montgomery, but yeah, i was fascinated by that story. i mean, you have it in lincoln president-elect, too, but even the nature of that train trip was interesting and revealed to my way of looking at it, a lot of the bankruptcy of the confederacy that, you know, i don't want to offend any trump admirers on this call, but it resembled -- it in some ways resembles the situation now that they were much clearer on their right to govern than they were on their actual governing. they weren't that interested in governing. they were very focused on their right to govern, and so davis to get from -- well, he lives on a plantation on the mississippi near the louisiana and mississippi boundary. he has to get to -- well, first, to vicksburg, then jackson. from jackson to montgomery is not very far, but to do that he can't do it because there's no train that goes between those two, so he's got to go on this wild round about route up to memphis, which is still in tennessee, which is still in the united states of america, across tennessee and then down into georgia, and it's slow and uncomfortable, and it just to me brought out the great difficulty the confederacy would have in actually working out a government and an economy that served its people in any way. so lincoln knows where davis is, and so to answer your question, yes, northerners are aware, but davis's words are -- i mean, they're as difficult for northern readers then to get as they are now and when i was talking about lincoln retelling american history, davis had a better point of purchase onto -- his family and his wife's family had served in the american revolution with much more distinction than lincoln's, but somehow lincoln out foxed him, and claimed the american revolution, which davis never did, and it might have helped his cause if he had. >> that's a really good point, that davis did not do that. i've seen a couple of speeches of his, they're very angry and belligerent, and i couldn't agree with you more that any idea that a southern military with all of the talent that it had from west point, that, you know, remained or became loyal to the confederacy, they should have noun. abraham lincoln, taking an inaugural journey that goes sort of like this and then this, and davis is going like this, this, and this. >> exactly. >> never going to be able to move supplies by rail. >> exactly. >> and they should have figured that out. but really interesting, the confederate government of course used george washington on the seal of the confederate states of america, and as james macpherson has pointed out, there are illusions to the fact that their rebellion is as sacred as the american revolution, but lincoln crystalized the thoughts better. >> right. >> we do -- we need to spend the last 15 minutes of our discussion, i'm sure there will be questions about this as well -- on the assassination plot because so much of your book is wrapped around the constant threat, and you talk about more near misses than i ever knew about. i mean, something exploding and shattering windows at a train station, innocuous accidents that must have brought terror to the family when they happened. i think your -- one of your major contributions with this book is that historians have tried for a long time to figure out when the news of a baltimore plot reached lincoln, and how credibly, and i did know better than to trace it to philadelphia on february 21st with perhaps some leaks to lincoln about it when he was in new york city. but you have done just a fabulous job of identifying new sources for the story. so i just want you to go through your discoveries here, and telling everyone about how this -- the threat was really with lincoln almost from the time he left springfield. >> well, thank you, harold. you know, again, your book was the spring board for so much of this for me. i also got a lot from a strange book that you know very well that we've talked about, which is victor searcher's 1960 book "lincoln's journey to greatness" which is on the same topic as my book. but it's strange, it has no footnotes and so you don't know where he got anything. and that's frustrating, and he was, i think -- i don't know very much about him. he was a kind of pr man in new york, i think. >> some of the best lincoln scholars are pr men from new york. >> that's funny. well, lincoln was a pretty good pr man for himself in a lot of ways, too. so -- but it's a wonderful book, too, so i mean i had frustrations in not knowing where he got things, but some of those stories about bombs going off in or near the train i got probably from victor searcher the first time, but then i was able to corroborate it some with deep reading of newspapers, which thank you for noticing that, and i just want to pause for a second to say very specifically where i did most of that work, and it was in this incredible database called chronicling america. i'm sure many historians on this call know it, but if you don't it's a database hosted by the library of congress and the national endowment for humanities, and michelle crowell is the great keeper of the manuscripts at the library of congress and on the prize jury, and i've always been grateful to her before, during and after, i actually worked at the library of congress. but with that database, you can -- it takes a little time to get to know how to search through it, and you have to search by state and by year, and once you have figured that out, you get this incredible cornucopia of local newspapers, and so by getting closer to the train and looking in the cincinnati papers, i found the story of a kind of grenade that was left in a car that lincoln was going into. in the ohio papers, although, actually, there's still a little bit of doubt about which small town in ohio the incident happened where the glass was shattered by the exploding of guns and artillery near the train, the glass fell on mary todd lincoln, even having access to those newspapers, sometimes they contradict each other, and another incident in upstate new york where guns were fired off and welcomed way too close to the train, so even the people welcoming club were sometimes causing him a lot of danger. >> on the subject of finding the first warnings of baltimore, you've identified a new source, obviously, a woman. >> so there were -- what was known, as you know, is the various writings of alan pinkerton who -- and he's a little confuse, too, i must say because he told this story many times. there are the original notebooks that he was keeping as he was brought in to protect lincoln, not unlike the secret service, but he actually worked for a railroad, not the government. and then he retold the story several times later in his life. it gets confusing also because ward lammen and i'm grateful to you harold for telling me how to pronounce his name, ward lammen didn't like alan pinkerton and they contradict each other a few times. and lincoln is part of the difficulty of knowing what really happened because he minimized the assassination plot later. he hardly ever talked about it, but when he did, he sort of soft peddled it probably because of lingering embarrassment over having to go all night, and the rumor, false, that he was in disguise. but where i found some really interesting source material was in the writings of a man named samuel felton who was from massachusetts but lived in philadelphia. he was the president of an important railroad, the philadelphia wilmington and baltimore, which basically joe biden's home turf. it was the train line from wilmington -- from philadelphia through wilmington through baltimore and washington so the last stretch of the route lincoln was going to be on. he was approached by a woman, and i was really happy to find two very interesting women in this story, and she was dorothea dix mental health advocate who despite restrictions common to her gender, she was a very effective political reformer traveling in southern states as well as northern throughout the 1850s advocating for the rights for the mentally ill and coming up through the south in the fall of 1860, including south carolina, somewhere she picked up hard intelligence of the plot to kill lincoln, and it was detailed. it was about train bridges coming into baltimore or possibly the way you transferred from one station in baltimore that took the trains from philadelphia into the -- that was the president street station into the camden street station, which is very near the baltimore orioles stadium. that's where you caught the train to washington. in that transfer between train stations, if they didn't get them on one of the bridges coming into baltimore, they were going to get him with he was in a horse and carriage going slowly through a crowd. and she went to the president of this railroad, samuel felton who later wrote down in his -- he wrote a written account of it that were in his papers in philadelphia that this woman dorothea dix had better information about the threat against lincoln than anyone in washington, d.c., or in any elected political office, and he was always grateful to her. so because of this intelligence, he sent out for pinkerton, who came from chicago. they talked about about what to do. pinkerton brought eight detectives with him, including another woman, a fascinating, very effective spy basically named kate warn or warne, i'm not sure how to pronounce her name, who was hiss most effective agent, they got all the information by going through baltimore restaurants and bars, pretending to be southerners, and they were able to warn lincoln and his entourage while they were en route at the same time they're separately getting a lot of the same information and also warning lincoln. >> so yeah, the dorothea dix, you got to read the papers of the railroad magnet, which is really great research, and i had no clue dorothea dix was in it. we know about kate warne because she appears i think under a different name in the movie "the tall target" for those who have seen that movie. >> it's quite a good movie. >> if you like the rough edge dick powell image, it's good. it's not a great lincoln at the very end. >> no. >> but was the plot -- i hope jonathan white is ready soon to come in with questions because there are so many stacked up that i don't want to take more time if we can spend the next do minutes instead of 15 on questions, that would be great. so my question is -- i hope my final question if we can get john in is how serious was the plot? i mean, was it a real assassination plot or just a bunch of rumors? because i mean, the one thing that i think mitigates against the seriousness is that while lincoln leaves harrisburg and makes his way overnight, he allows the presidential special to come through baltimore as scheduled with his wife and sons in the car. >> right. >> and people pound -- if you read the newspaper accounts, people are pounding on the railroad car in, you know, anger. so he left his family pretty exposed there. >> true. it's true and it's a good question. it's a fair question including, like i just said, the lincoln soft peddled it in some ways afterwards, but i still find the evidence more persuasive than not, so the best of the evidence is alan pinkerton's various tellings of the story, and he was really involved. he was there in baltimore as a gatherer of the intelligence that led to the decision to send lincoln through in the middle of the night, then he's with lincoln in that dark commuter train. it's just him and lem going through with lincoln in the middle of the night, so i doubt pinkerton, who is a reputable person in many ways, later in his life would fabricate the evidence, even if he wants to sell books, i don't think he would just lie outright about the plot. but especially dorothea dix's role who she's an upright person, she did not talk about it herself, but felton is a very reputable transcriber of the conversation he had with dorothea dix, it's right there. it's in the historical society of pennsylvania. so as you know, harold, there were so many warnings, including letters coming in, many from baltimore, i mean, quite a few warning him of the danger he was about to go through, and a couple came from military officers in the u.s. army, and he asked them to come on the train with him. so the same people who were warning him before the journey began he invites onto the train, which makes me think their warnings were credible. and then a lot of citizens in baltimore were writing to him saying you cannot come through town. you have to come in disguise or in the middle of the night. your point about letting his wife and children come through the next day is a really good point. how could he in good conscience expose them to the same danger? all i can say is maybe our ideas about protecting women and children were so different then that he didn't think anyone would hurt them. it's not the greatest answer, but one last point is when i read martin johnson's book "writing the gettysburg address," which i enjoyed a lot, he describes lincoln's train trip through baltimore heading to gettysburg, and once again, it was pretty dicey that there were thugs climbing onto the side of the car trying to get at lincoln and only with bayonets could the soldiers get those guys off the train. so baltimore stayed really tough. and as you know, it was -- it was violent when the massachusetts troops came through in april 1861. >> some of it inexplicable, all of it a little bit frightening. >> yep, yep. >> so i see jonathan white is on. i'm going to sign off for a bit and come back. thank you, ted. >> thank you, harold. >> this was a great conversation. >> i could go another couple of hours. >> me too. >> jonathan has -- i see a lot of questions stacked up here, so i'm going to turn it over to him. >> thank you, harold. thank you, ted, that was wonderful. what a wonderful conversation. great way to start off our forum today. we've got a lot of questions in the q & a. i'll start with one from brian steinbergen. and he asked how many of the places along the route were you able to visit during the process of writing the book? >> great question. i have a pretty disappointing answer, which is only a handful. i still mean to go -- i mean, i had a fantasy that my author tour would take me to some of those places and then all of my bookstore visits were wiped out by the pandemic. i've done zero, but through the magic of zoom i picked up a lot of them. i went to springfield. i've been once in my life probably around 2012 it was magical. i'd love to go back. i went into the library, but i need to go back, even though the book is out, i have a strong desire to go back. i've been to cleveland and pittsburgh and philadelphia for separate reasons. i've been to those places. i went to cleveland -- i am a rail buff, so i once took a train to cleveland. i went all the way to chicago but through cleveland, and new york i -- i now live in new york, and i grew up in providence, so i've done the last stretch from new york to washington, hundreds and probably thousands of times, but i need to go in a car. i'm a parent of a son in his young 20s, if i can persuade my son to go with me, i need to get to springfield and in a car go through those small towns in illinois and indiana and southern ohio and the outskirts of pittsburgh and then up to cleveland and slowly across upstate new york, and i want to take like six weeks and really do it right. but i have not done it as well as i would like to. >> sure. a question from mel moorer, he asks whose idea was it for lincoln to take the journey to washington in this way? >> well, he had to get there somehow, and trains were already established as the best way to go from west to east, and he had been on trains many times, including a year earlier to do the cooper union speech and the new england states afterwards. so it was almost certainly going to be a train trip, but the route was a little bit up in the air, and as the planning came together in january of 1861, it seems that seward and his political ally thurlough weed of new york state were very involved, and they probably found the railroad guy they found to sort of the create the route and deal with the people in every station and clear the route of trains and that was a guy named william wood who later appeared to be a pretty dangerous member of lincoln's entourage. he later was bribing mary todd lincoln with expensive gifts and seeking favors and may have been in cahoots with people who wanted to harm lincoln. so even with all seward and weed's preparation they found a guy who was kind of suspicious. >> yeah. this is sort of a follow-up question it comes from mark kevitt, and he said -- he prefaced his question by saying he really enjoyed the book. he asked who within lincoln's circle -- and this might be wood or others -- was responsible for the lodgingistics and the planning of the trip, things like changing trains or arranging meals or speaking at the different state legislatures? >> that's a great question. that's the kind of thing -- again, i don't want to use the word waste, i slowed down as i got into the minutia of train travel in 1861, and fortunately there were a lot of great books and manuscripts that have been preserved in libraries because the train was such an exciting thing to americans in the middle of the 19th century, and i believe it was exciting to lincoln himself. i think wood, the guy i just mentioned, is the simplest and best answer, so his job, he had railroad experience. his job was to write ahead through letters and telegrams to make sure they were ready for the presidential special and to let everyone know where exactly it was. also, to deal with media. so media are on the train in a way not unlike air force one. they're in the back, president-elect is up in the front with his family. it's exactly like air force one. but there are other local actors who are very interesting, so in pittsburgh you have a gaggle of railroad executives who are just amazing movers and shakers, and there's a guy named thomas scott who's a young man but very high up with the pennsylvania railroad, and then he has recognized the talents in an even younger young man, andrew carnegie, who is first a kind of teenage telegraph vunder can. he's the fastest telegraph operator. thomas edison also was an extremely fast telegraph operator, and then carnegie is promoted over and over and over again by scott to be a kind of manager of the pennsylvania railroad, and those guys follow lincoln into washington and become really important in managing the north railroad's supremacy, which is very much a factor in the north's ultimate winning of the civil war. >> yeah. this question comes from pete rad, and he asks did lincoln discuss or even mention slavery in any of the speeches he gave along the way? and if so, what did he say, and if not, why didn't he? >> great question. i mean, he is writing the first inaugural on route. he has completed his first draft and set it in type in springfield, but he's still adjusting it, and orville browning is with him on the first day of the trip and offers an important single word change, which harold describes in lincoln president-elect, and i also mention, it's a kind of -- a change of a verb to be more conciliatory toward the south, and when he's addressing southern audiences, i mentioned that in southern indiana and then in cincinnati, he sort of talks aloud to the south, he's saying things like we are like you. we respect you. we would act as you are doing, which convey that he will not do anything to touch slavery where it exists in the southern states that are not territories that are actual states, and that is his message in his first inaugural address. so the short answer is he's not really talking about it in most of his northern stops on the route, but when he's near the south, he gives these little verbal hints that he will not touch it where it exists, but he is also resisting the attempts that are coming in to him privately through his correspondents or through word of mouth that if he just of mouth that if he just agrees to this compromise or this other one that somehow the crisis will go away and he isn't agreeing to those compromises. so, in that important way, he's rejecting the idea that so many other northern presidents greed to that somehow a last-minute compromise will allow slavery to spread out into the west and that is the rock upon which he will not compromise at all. and that's the rock upon which the civil war begins. >> that's right. i'm going to combine two questions here. bonnie asks how much time lincoln had for self-contemplation during this journey and angela asks what you think was sort of the biggest impact this trip had on lincoln. >> not much time for contemplation. it was a harrowing journey. physically and mentally grueling. and i came away amazed that he could formulate his thoughts as well as he did delivering those beautiful speeches in trenton, new jersey and philadelphia at the very end and a very nice one in harrisburg, pennsylvania, after philadelphia. so, his hand, his arm ached. he lost his voice over and over again. including halfway through the trip and miraculously it came back. but he was in kind of physical agony, especially in his hand and arm from shaking tens of thousands of hands. but he did it. you know, he stood up and did it over and over again. and that was something i was very moved by is his physical courage and his mental courage. and he just showed up for every difficult job that was expected of him. the humble jobs of sort of standing outside an assembly room in a state house letting 2,000 people come through and all have a piece of him, including a possible assassin. but then even with no time to write speeches, he's saying things ever more beautifully and that, i don't know how he did that, but i imagine falling asleep at night he's going through the thoughts in his mind and he did fall asleep the last, second to last night of the trip near independence hall. so, i'm sure he was thinking about the declaration and what it meant to him and then he shows up at dawn the next morning and says there's, i've never had a political sentiment that did not originate with the words that were written here. and it's very beautiful. so, i'm sorry, can you repeat the second part of the question? >> what part of the trip had the greatest impact on lincoln? >> well, i think seeing all those faces looking up to him for leadership gave him inspiration the way it mustfor every person including donald trump, including the 45th president. there's something about the size of the job and the size of the population of the united states that fills you with a fair amount of awe and reverence and you do have the feeling of lincoln growing into the job that he's from springfield, illinois, very much so as he steps on to the train and he is thinking about the totality of american history by the time he arrives in washington. so, i think just as americans saw him and were comforted over and over again, people said in their correspondence or newspaper articles he's not as homely as i thought. he spoke better than i expected him to. so, seeing all those tens and hundreds of thousands of people built him some political capital which he really needed because he has less than 40% of the vote, but, also, i think it fills him with the sense that, yes, i am the heir to washington and jefferson and to jackson and he's reading jackson as he's composing his first inaugural address. washington more than the others he mentions washington a lot. he mentions him in the farewell address at springfield and then over and over again. so, i think he had a growing consciousness that he had to continue to be the captain of a ship. he talks about the ships of state, also. and i wondered a few times if the train he's on has become literally the ship of state. but he's the captain of a vessel much as george washington had been both as a revolutionary commander and then as the first president. so, seeing those hundreds of thousands and really millions by the time the trip is done i think filled him up with a job just as they were comforted by seeing him. >> right. we have so many more great questions, but we only have about three minutes. so, i think we can only ask about one more. j.s. writes this. in brad meltzer's, he writes that he road in the train car with lincoln and disguised as her sickly brother. is there any truth of that? dave weegers asks about where the story of the disguise comes from. can you talk two or three minutes about that. >> i want to say to all the members of this wonderful organization and especially to frank and to herald, if any of you want to e-mail me after the fact, happy to try to answer questions by e-mail. i have one e-mail which you can find online and i still have an e-mail at brown university where i used to work which is just ted underscore widmer@brown.edu. i don't remember in the facts that he was disguised as her sickly brother. a 1960s movie called "the tall target." a figure who talks about her sick relative and that becomes, you don't really even see him for most of the movie. it's a sort of shadow in the background. but in the sources that i consulted that are largely at the huntington library but published in a book called "lincoln and the baltimore plot" there was no reference of a sick, i want to be precise, it wasn't as specific as that. the train was held up at philadelphia at the last minute because what was called an important package had to be given to the conductor of the train. very important for delivery in washington. that was a pile, a package of meaningless paper. and as that package was being handed to the conductor in philadelphia at a station that no longer exists, but in downtown philadelphia, lincoln was climbing into the back of the train where a door was opened, kate warren had gotten on to the train and had reserved by bribing a conductor and she might have said something about an invuled relative there. but the main excuse was the delivery of a package. that was a bogus excuse just so lincoln could climb into the back. >> thank you so much, ted. this is a wonderful conversation between you and herald. i want to remind all our viewers that you can order ted's book "lincoln on the verge" and also order herald's book "the president versus the press" and we have created a very special book plate for the 25th anniversary of the lincoln forum symposium that will be signed by the author. there is a link to the gettysburg heritage center in the chat box you can click on. it will take you right to the story or go to gettysburgmuseumstore.com. mark the one year anniversary of the coronavirus pandemic in the u.s. live coverage beginning at 8:00 p.m. eastern on c-span or listen with our free c-span radio app. american history tv on c-span3. exploring the events that tell the american story. saturday at 2:00 p.m. eastern university of georgia professor john morrow recounts the story of eugene bullard and at 6:00 p.m. eastern on the civil war, brad stone from the national museum of civil war medicine looks at the role animals served in the civil war from transporting supplies to acting as mascots. on sunday at 2:00 p.m. eastern the life and legacy of sojurner truth. spoke out on abolition and women's rights. at 8:00 p.m. on the presidency, a look at the personal and political partnership between franklin and eleanor roosevelt through home movies, which give a behind the scenes look at the couple. exploring the american story. watch american history tv this weekend on c-span3. c-span 3 was created by america's television companies. we are provided by these networks. live on capitol hill for a hearing looking that reliability of the nation's electric grid following the recent blackouts in texas. the senate of energy and natural resources. this is live coverage on c-span3. the committee is meeting today for both a business meeting and a hearing. we're going to begin by considering the nomination of david turk to be the deputy secretary of energy. i'm g
Related Keywords
Louisiana , United States , Alabama , State House , Illinois , Trenton , New Jersey , Chicago , Baltimore , Maryland , New York , Georgia , Springfield , Texas , Missouri , West Point , Washington , Philadelphia , Pennsylvania , Kentucky , Cleveland , Ohio , Rhode Island , Columbus , Indiana , Virginia , Togo , Cincinnati , Ohio River , Germany , Capitol Hill , District Of Columbia , Turkey , Americans , America , Turk , American , Thomas Edison , Samuel Felton , Eugene Bullard , Joe Biden , William Wood , Martin Johnson , Augusta Stevenson , James Buchanan , George Washington , Abraham Lincoln , Kate Warren , Ted Widmer , Barack Obama , Mel Moorer , Alan Pinkerton , Martin Van Buren , Frank Williams , Harold Ted , Brad Meltzer , Al Gore , Kate Warne , Fernando Wood ,
comparemela.com © 2020. All Rights Reserved.