If my name ever goes into history, it will be for this act, and my whole soul is in it.
— A. Lincoln, 1863The Daily Commute and the President's Security
In this section...
Map of Lincoln's Route to
and from Soldiers' Home
During the months President Lincoln lived in the cottage at the Soldiers' Home, every day he commuted to and from the White House. The President woke early in the morning, according to his personal secretary John Hay, ate a frugal breakfast of toast and an egg, and rode into Washington by 8 a.m. 1
Early in his presidency, Lincoln opposed his advisors' attempts to surround him with better security, and this included resistance to being escorted on his daily commute. He often rode through the streets of Washington at night without any guards whatsoever.
While the President's family were at their summer-house, near Washington, he rode into town of a morning, or out at night, attended by a mounted escort; but if he returned to town for a while after dark, he rode in unguarded, and often alone, in his open carriage.
— Noah Brooks, journalist and friend of the Lincoln family, 1864.2
By the end of the summer of 1862, Secretary of War Stanton compelled Lincoln to accept a military escort of a cavalry officer and about 25 to 30 additional men. The 11th New York Cavalry served as his escort in 1863. Later in the war, the Union Light Guard from Ohio, also known as the Black Horse Cavalry, guarded Lincoln on his commute, and the 150th Pennsylvania Volunteers were stationed at the Soldiers' Home. The President complained about his escorts, particularly because he thought they were noisy and possibly too inexperienced for their new duties.
[President Lincoln protested to Army Chief of Staff Henry Halleck] against a small detachment of cavalry which had been detailed without his request, and partly against his will, by the lamented General Wadsworth, as a guard for his carriage in going to and returning from the Soldiers' Home. The burden of his complaint was that he and Mrs. Lincoln couldn't hear themselves talk? for the clatter of their sabres and spurs; and that, as many of them appeared new hands and very awkward, he was more afraid of being shot by the accidental discharge of one of their carbines or revolvers, than of any attempt on his life or for his capture by the roving squads of Jeb Stuart's cavalry, then hovering all round the exterior works of the city.
— Colonel Halpine, aide to Army Chief of Staff Henry Halleck.3
On one occasion, in August 1864, a sniper attempted to assassinate the President as he traveled by horseback to the cottage alone late at night. The would-be assassin did not injure him. Concerned by this and other threats to the President's life in 1864, the War Department stepped up the President's security force and required him to be escorted by a personal bodyguard at all times.4
1John Hay to William H. Herndon, Paris, 5 September 1866, in Douglas L. Wilson and Rodney O. Davis, eds., Herndon's Informants: Letters, Interviews, and Statements about Abraham Lincoln (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 331, cited in Matt Pinsker, Matt Pinsker, Lincoln=s Wartime Retreat (Draft), National Trust for Historic Preservation, 2001, 10.
2Noah Brooks, 21 July 1864, in Michael Burlingame, Lincoln Observed: Civil War Dispatches of Noah Brooks (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 205.
3Col. Halpine, quoted in F. B. Carpenter, The Inner Life of Abraham Lincoln: Six Months at the White House (orig. pub. 1866; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 67, cited in Pinsker, 124-25.