Underscore
for the Battles
Janet Kuypers
2/10/19
Dateline, November, 1860.
Abraham Lincoln is elected
the 16th President of the
United States of America.
Among Democrats, Lincoln
won over other democrats,
including Stephen Douglas,
who first fought Lincoln in
the Lincoln-Douglas debates
which was, guess what,
all about slavery, which, of
course, Lincoln was against.
But over the course of
Lincoln’s run as President,
you might be vaguely aware
that he was assassinated,
but what you might not know
is that the attempts on his life
started before be even became
the President of the United States.
Because the southern states
(the ones that wanted to secede)
weren’t fond of Lincoln, and
Lincoln knew this, so he thought
it would be smart to go on a
whistle-stop train tour
to Washington, D.C.. But
fearing his safety early on,
he hired Allan Pinkerton
as his private security, and
his security teams finds out
that a lot of people want
Lincoln dead. The security
team then went to Baltimore,
one of the stops on
Lincoln’s whistle stop tour,
and they stayed at
the Barnum Hotel, and
tried to act “southern”,
to infiltrate southerners
there. They then found
Cipriano Ferrandini, a
beady-eyed Corsican barber
who planned to kill Lincoln.
So, as Lincoln is taking
the train in his tour,
they stop in Harrisburg, PA,
and Pinkerton told him
that they have to speed
their trip and skip a stop
to the can escape the plan
of the assassins in Maryland.
So what do they do?
They remove that hat
that Lincoln is so well known
for, wrap him in a shawl
and claim he’s their invalid
brother that needs to get
on the train. This way they
thought they’d pass Baltimore
before noon the next day,
or before the scheduled
assassination. But in the
middle of the night, while
in Baltimore, the train
stops. ‘Why is the train
stopped?’ they wonder,
and the found out that
Baltimore has a sound
ordinance, so they train
couldn’t run for hours.
Lincoln’s a sitting suck
in this train, whose engines
aren’t allowed to run at
this hour, so they did the
only thing they could think:
The got horses, and literally
hooked the train car
up to the horses, and
they snuck out of town,
quiet as a mouse.
Or, quiet as horses,
which is more quiet
than a locomotive train.
And yeah, they get
through Baltimore
and stop at Baltimore’s
Camden Street Station
to join the train to
Washington, D.C. —
which was nowhere
to be found. At this point,
they could hear
the people all around,
talking about how
terrible Lincoln was,
and the South will rise...
and Pinkerton is stunned
that Lincoln is sitting her,
hiding near people
that want him killed.
But thank goodness,
the Washington train
eventually showed up,
and at 6:00 A.M., February 23rd,
Abraham Lincoln arrives
in Washington D.C., averting
the 1st assassination attempt
on his life. This was a
perfect underscore
for the battles Abraham
Lincoln had to endure:
he shouldered a century’s
burden, the burden for first
declaring some human
beings are anything but
human beings. We may
look now and find it
impossible to believe
humans were bought
and sold, tortured in
a hot box for days.
We hear the speech
of having a dream for
unity — and on some
levels it may still be
a dream, but after blacks
have run companies in the
U.S. and run the Presidency,
we all must think
that there’s nothing
any of us can do.
So, this fear founded from
servitude and slavery
is no longer a part
our vocabulary.
But when it was
the norm, imagine
the uphill battle
one man had to face:
to try to convince
an entire nation
that their property
isn’t property at all,
but living, breathing
human beings. What
an uphill battle. And oh, how
he paid for his beliefs.
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