Taking Precautions

In response to the threats to his life on the way to his inauguration in 1861, Abraham Lincoln secretly left his whistle-stop train for the relative safety of a  different and darkened train.

Along the route of his first train, “at regular intervals, fifteen thousand sober-faced flagmen each held a white pennant aloft,” Elizabeth Mitchell wrote in her book  Lincoln’s Lie. “They also clutched a lowered red flag should they need to signal that an armed killer lurked ahead. Nearly all the passengers feared that they would still be targeted since no conspirator would know Lincoln had left their midst,” she noted.

Source: Elizabeth Mitchell, Lincoln’s Lie: A True Civil War Caper Through Fake News, Wall Street, and the White House (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2020) Kindle