In spite of all the cheers and the enthusiasm,
there was also an under-current of anxiety for his personal
safety, for the South had openly boasted that Lincoln would never
live to be inaugurated President. He himself paid no heed to such
warnings; but the railroad officials, and others who were
responsible for his journey, had detectives on watch at different
points to report any suspicious happenings. Nothing occurred to
change the program already agreed upon until the party reached
Philadelphia; but there Mr. Lincoln was met by Frederick W.
Seward, the son of his future Secretary of State, with an
important message from his father. A plot had been discovered to
do violence to, and perhaps kill, the President-elect as he
passed through the city of Baltimore. Mr. Seward and General
Scott, the venerable hero of the Mexican War, who was now at the
head of the army, begged him to run no risk, but to alter his
plans so that a portion of his party might pass through Baltimore
by a night train without previous notice. The seriousness of the
warning was doubled by the fact that Mr. Lincoln had just been
told of a similar, if not exactly the same, danger, by a Chicago
detective employed in Baltimore by one of the great railroad
companies. Two such warnings, coming from entirely different
sources, could not be disregarded; for however much Mr.
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