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The Baltimore plot

The 1861 conspiracy to assassinate president-elect Abraham Lincoln as his train passed through Baltimore, uncovered by Pinkerton detectives — and the overnight passage in a soft felt hat and shawl that got him to his inauguration and made the press call him a coward.

The Baltimore plot was a conspiracy to kill president-elect Abraham Lincoln as his train passed through Baltimore on the way to Washington, where he was to take the oath of office. John Kiriakou, who raises it as the first and favourite of his historical parallels to the catering truck transfer, calls it a legitimate plot — uncovered, he says, by Pinkerton detectives, and dated by him to March 1861.[1][2]

Baltimore was hostile ground. Maryland was a southern state, but it did not secede and did not join the Confederacy; it wanted, in Kiriakou’s phrase, to stay out of it. Marylanders nonetheless hated Lincoln, who had taken two per cent of the vote in the city.[2]

The telegraph wires were cut and the future president slipped through Baltimore overnight wearing a soft felt hat and a shawl, hidden in a sleeping car, while the detective Kate Warne travelled as his sister. He reached Washington safely and was sworn in — and was then, Kiriakou says, roasted by the press, which universally called him a coward for refusing to face his assassins like a man.[3][4]

See also

References

  1. John Kiriakou, 2026-08-1312:27 on YouTube · Transcript
  2. John Kiriakou, 2026-08-1312:57 on YouTube · Transcript
  3. John Kiriakou, 2026-08-1313:28 on YouTube · Transcript
  4. John Kiriakou, 2026-08-1313:58 on YouTube · Transcript

Sourced from John Kiriakou's on-record public statements. See his profile for the full body of his interviews, podcast appearances, and short-form video.