John Miller: The First Assassin

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 Senor, 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.