EDITOR’S NOTE: The following is an excerpt from The First Assassin, by John J. Miller.

Saturday, February 23, 1861

When Lorenzo Smith heard the chugging of the train, he felt for the revolver at his side. His fingers met its smooth handle, hidden beneath his black coat. Then he found the short barrel and the trigger below. Smith had reached for it a dozen times in the last hour, but he wanted to be certain that the gun was still there. It will make me a hero, he thought. It will change history.

Listening for the rumble of the train had been difficult. A loud mass of people waited for its arrival at Calvert Street Station. Smith did not know how many were there, but they must have numbered in the thousands. The noisy throng spilled from the open-ended depot onto Calvert and Franklin Streets. Inside the station, where Smith stood, shouts bounced off the walls and ceiling. This place of tearful departures and happy reunions had become a hotbed of agitation.

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The train’s steam whistle pierced the din of the crowd. The engine would pull into Baltimore on schedule, at half past noon. Heads bobbed for a view. Smith struggled to keep his position near the track. He had picked it two hours earlier, when the flood of people was just a trickle. He was not sure precisely where the train would stop, but he thought he had made a good guess about where the last car might come to a halt. He wanted to be within striking distance.

As the locomotive’s big chimney came into view, a man standing next to Smith bellowed, “Here he comes! Here comes the Black Republican!” A roar of jeers and insults filled the station. Smith craned his neck. He saw the engine’s massive oil lamp mounted on top of the smoke box. It gazed forward like the unblinking eye of a mechanical Cyclops. Behind it were the cab, the coal tender, and a line of cars. Flags and streamers covered them all. The whole train glistened from a recent cleaning. At the rear, Smith spotted a car painted in orange and black. He reached into his coat another time and tapped the gun. Just making sure.

For the last ten days, the train carrying Abraham Lincoln on his inaugural journey from Springfield, Ill., to Washington, D.C., had taken the president-elect through six northern states — all populated by the abolitionists who had voted him into office. Applause greeted him at almost every stop. But on this morning, as Lincoln’s train turned south into Maryland, it had entered slaveholding territory for the first time. Baltimore was the only city on the trip that had not extended a formal welcome to the incoming president — an obvious snub that pleased Smith when he thought of it.

Smith scanned the crowd and saw several men wearing hats with blue-ribbon cockades. This was the fashion among Baltimore’s secessionist set. Each cockade had a button in its center displaying the palmetto tree, the symbol of South Carolina. That state had quit the Union in December, before any of the others. Many Marylanders now wanted to join the growing Confederacy. The moment Lincoln pulled into the depot, the members of the mob would let him know that he did not have their support. They did not even respect him. In fact, they hated him.

Rumors had circulated for weeks that Lincoln would not be safe when he reached Baltimore. But the president-elect had no choice about the visit. The only rail route into Washington from the north required going through Baltimore. Lincoln had to stop and switch to the Baltimore & Ohio Rail Road line at another station more than a mile away. That meant the presidential party would have to make a slow transit from one depot to the other, surrounded the whole way by an angry swarm. Lincoln was supposed to catch a three o’clock departure for Washington, where he would arrive about an hour and a half later.