February witnessed the secession of Texas, the election of Jefferson Davis as President and Alexander H. Stephens as Vice-president of the Confederate States of America, and the withdrawal of several Senators and Representatives from the United States Congress. The only cheering news of the month was the refusal of Tennessee and Missouri to secede, though both States contained a multitude of citizens who would have preferred to do so. Daily the galleries of Congress were crowded with spectators representing all shades of opinion and at times uncontrollable in their expressions of approval or disapproval. When the House voted to submit a Constitutional amendment forbidding the interference of Congress with slavery or any other State institution, one element in the gallery burst into deafening applause; the opposing element in the Senate became equally boisterous in applauding a speech by Andrew Johnson, denouncing as a traitor any man who should fire upon the flag or conspire to take over Government property for the Confederacy. The difference in the treatment of the two outbreaks was significant: that in the House was merely rebuked in words, but in the Senate the gallery was cleared and closed to spectators for the rest of the day.
In fairness it should be said that at this trying juncture several men in positions of responsibility, who had made no secret of their interest in the Southern cause, acted the honorable part when put to the test. Vice-president Breckinridge was credited by current gossip with an intention, at the official count of the electoral vote, to refuse to declare Lincoln elected, or permit a mob to break up the session and destroy the authenticated returns. On the contrary, he conducted the count with as much scrupulousness in every detail as if his heart were in the result. Equal praise is due to the chief of the Capitol police, who, though bitterly hostile to Mr. Lincoln, took all the precautions for his safety on the day of inauguration that his best friend could have taken.
Thus the Buchanan administration went out, and the Lincoln administration came in. The persistent
warnings of a plot to kill or kidnap the President-elect led to the adoption of an extraordinary program for bringing him safely to Washington. Under the escort of an experienced detective, he made the journey from Harrisburg at high speed, in a special train provided by the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, all the tracks having been previously cleared, and the telegraph wires cut along the route. Meanwhile, a sensational newspaper had published locally a story that Lincoln was already in the city, having been smuggled through Baltimore in disguise in order to elude the conspirators who were waiting there to assassinate him. This fiction so incensed William H. Seward, who had been in Washington preparing for the arrival of his future chief, that Lincoln was not allowed to make a toilet after his night’s journey, but was hurried, all unwashed and unshaven, to the Capitol, so that the members of Congress could see him and satisfy themselves of the falsity of what they had read.