The Baltimore Plot: The First Conspiracy to Assassinate Abraham Lincoln

by Michael J. Kline

Was evidence of a plot to murder Abraham Lincoln as he traveled through Baltimore en route to his 1861 inauguration genuine, or was it a product of detective Allan Pinkerton s imagination? Historians have been divided on the issue, but to author Kline, a lawyer by occupation, a conspiracy case based on circumstantial evidence can be made, and he makes it in exacting but fascinating detail. For dramatic support to his legal briefs, Kline recounts Lincoln s train journey, climaxing in a scene in which Lincoln must decide whether to credit Pinkerton s report of having infiltrated a conspiracy and to heed Pinkerton s counsel to alter his travel schedule through Baltimore, then a secessionist hotbed with a reputation for mob violence. It was a second, independent source of intelligence that convinced Lincoln to accede to Pinkerton, which also buttresses Kline s conviction that the plot was real. Gathering inculpatory information, arguing its probative value, and re-creating the tension of the secession crisis, Kline will absorb Lincoln readers with his thorough presentation of Lincoln s surreptitious arrival in Washington, which Lincoln himself subsequently regretted.
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