It's a figment of your imagination. Mary Lincoln and the rest of the Lincoln family arrived after Lincoln did, that much is true. They arrived about 12 hours later. During that time Lincoln met with key Republicans, President Buchanan, and some office seeker, and rode around Washington with Seward. His presence in Washington was common knowledge long before Mrs. Lincoln left Harrisburg. They were never in any danger, unless you think the rebel mob would have deliberately targeted woman and children.
Your denial says a lot about your intellectual honesty, and like what the Baltimore Plot says about Lincoln's character, it's not good. Here's the text of a letter I sent to someone (Princeton Graduate) back in 2002 regarding this topic:
I found this text in a file on my computer. I cannot find the copies of the relevant pages of the books I mentioned or the NY Times articles. But any decent library has this stuff. You could go look it up; but I doubt you will. Ignorance is bliss, I guess.It took me a while to find where I had read the account of Lincoln leaving his family to ride on a train which he feared might be attacked, and traveling separately to Washington.
The reason it took a while is that I looked in my mainstream histories first. Most don’t mention the event at all. McPherson, who is the most mainstream of all, does write about it in Battle Cry of Freedom, albeit with a considerable sugarcoating it would seem.
Eventually I found what I recalled in E. A. Pollard’s Southern History of the Civil War. Considering your comment though, that I probably read what I recounted in some anti-Lincoln tome, I decided to check further. (Pollard is decidedly anti-Lincoln.)
What I found confirms the Pollard history, and bolsters my contention that the history we have been taught about that period is extremely dishonest.
See it you agree with me. I’ve provided copies of everything I found concerning this event for you to read, if you care to.
The first place I looked was at the New York Times microfilm. The Times then was decidedly pro-Lincoln, and a Times reporter appears to have been one of the few people who actually was trusted with the knowledge that Lincoln left the threatened train. His confirmation of the Pollard history amounts to what lawyers call an admission against interests. Take a look at the items I highlighted, and everything else too if you wish. It’s not a pretty picture. The bottom line is that there was a fear that the train would be derailed where it would cause death to those in the derailed cars. Lincoln left the train in such a manner that anyone plotting against the train would be unaware that he had left it, but he let his wife and most of his party continued riding in the car he thought threatened.
I also looked at a few Lincoln biographies without finding anything. (I looked for items indexed under Baltimore.) But when I looked at biographies of his wife, I found Turner and Turner’s Mary Todd Lincoln, Her Life and Letters. They do describe the event. Most telling of all is their observation that “She was not free of anxiety … until her own train had passed safely through the restless crowds in Baltimore.” The Turners cite as a source Cuthbert’s Lincoln and the Baltimore Plot, which interestingly is also cited by mainstream McPherson. (I guess McPherson didn’t have room in his book for all the details?) I couldn’t find this 1949 book in the libraries I have access to, but I did attempt to purchase a used copy via the Internet. We’ll see what it says when and if I get it.
The Baltimore Plot isn’t really something that I’ve thought much about before this week. But its treatment in the references I consulted confirms once again that all I was taught about the War Between the States isn’t all there is to know.
ML/NJ