He deliberately delayed his arrival in Washington and availed himself of official invitations to stay at four great towns and five State capitals which he could conveniently pass on his way.  The journey abounded in small incidents and speeches, some of which exposed him to a little ridicule in the press, though they probably created an undercurrent of sympathy for him.  Near one station where the train stopped lived a little girl he knew, who had recently urged upon him to wear a beard or whiskers.  To this dreadful young person, and to that persistent good nature of his which was now and then fatuous, was due the ill-designed hairy ornamentation which during his Presidency hid the really beautiful modelling of his jaw and chin.  He enquired for her at the station, had her fetched from the crowd, claimed her praise for this supposed improvement, and kissed her in presence of the press.  In New York he was guilty of a more sinister and tragic misfeasance.  In that city, where, if it may be said with respect, there has existed from of old a fashionable circle not convinced of its own gentility and insisting the more rigorously on minor decorum, Lincoln went to the opera, and history still deplores that this misguided man went there and sat there with his large hands in black kid gloves.  Here perhaps it is well to say that the educated world of the Eastern States, including those who privately deplored Lincoln’s supposed unfitness, treated its untried chief magistrate with that engrained good breeding to which it was utterly indifferent how plain a man he might be.  His lesser speeches as he went were unstudied appeals to loyalty, with very simple avowals of inadequacy to his task, and expressions of reliance on the people’s support when he tried to do his duty.  To a man who can sometimes speak from the heart and to the heart as Lincoln did it is perhaps not given to be uniformly felicitous.  Among these speeches was that delivered at Philadelphia, which has already been quoted, but most of them were not considered felicitous at the time.  They were too unpretentious.  Moreover, they contained sentences which seemed to understate the gravity of the crisis in a way which threw doubt on his own serious statesmanship.  Whether they were felicitous or not, the intention of these much-criticised utterances was the best proof of his statesmanship.  He would appeal to the steady loyalty of the North, but he was not going to arouse its passion.  He assumed to the last that calm reflection might prevail in the South, which was menaced by nothing but “an artificial crisis.”  He referred to war as a possibility, but left no doubt of his own wish by all means to avoid it.  “There will,” he said, “be no bloodshed unless it be forced on the Government.  The Government will not use force unless force is used against it.”

Before he passed through Baltimore he received earnest communications from Seward and from General Scott.  Each had received trustworthy information of a plot, which existed, to murder him in that city.  Owing to their warnings he went through Baltimore secretly at night, so that his arrival in Washington, on February 23, was unexpected.  This was his obvious duty, and nobody who knew him was ever in doubt of his personal intrepidity; but of course it helped to damp the effect of what many people would have been glad to regard as a triumphal progress.