Who is a terrorist?  What constitutes a serious terrorist threat?  

Those were questions that the President Elect of the United States pondered the nights of February 21st and 22nd, 1861, when Allen Pinkerton, a detective he trusted, and Frederick Seward, son of his greatest Republican Rival and choice for  Secretary of State, warned him that he ought not to appear in public in Baltimore as scheduled because plans were afoot to assassinate him.

Lincoln chose to heed the warning, donned a disguise of a soft cap, and passed through Baltimore unseen and unheralded on the night of the 22nd,  leaving Mrs. Lincoln and the children to face the crowd awaiting his arrival from Harrisburg the following day, February 23.

[slouched hat cartoon]

From that day forward, historians have argued over whether or not there was plot and in the course of their narratives have not only created myths and purpetrated fallacies, but also have missed a few clues.
 

Historians fall into two main camps, as you might expect.

There are those who follow the lead of John Thomas Scharf, who had dual career with the Confederate Army and Navy.  He went to great lengths to argue that Baltimoreans would never do anything so ignoble,  even though the cause was just.  According to Scharf, who spilled more ink than any historian in denial, there simply was no evidence of a plot and after all no one was ever arrested for even contemplating one, although plenty of other good citizens were thrown into jail without benefit of habeas corpus.

The other camp is led by the carefully considered research of a good friend of mine from Graduate School Days,   William Evitts, who in "A Matter of Allegiances"  based his arguments in favor of their being such a plot on the papers of Allan Pinkerton which the Huntington Library acquired, and which Norma B. Cuthbert edited for publication in 1949.   Scharf denied that there were any names associated with the plot.  Bill Evitts used Pinkerton's papers (of which the Huntington Library only had transcripts made by  Lincoln's friend and biographer William Herndon--the originals apprently were lost in the Chicago Fire) to nameCipriano Ferrandini, a Baltimore Hairdresser/Barber  as the Captain of the Terrorists.  Bill found the Pinkerton evidence convincing, and other historians, like Bob Brugger, have accepted his conclusions,  even though they do not mention Ferrandini by name.

Who was Cipriano Ferrandini.  What facts can we glean about his life before we attempt to evaluate the level of threat, if any, that he posed against the life of Lincoln?

Because we have  a project at the Archives to bring all extant vital records in Maryland on line, I decided to begin with the end,  to see if there were any records of anyone with such a distinctive name who died in Maryland.  Believe it or not we found two, Father and Son.  For our purposes here, the Father interests us the most.
[House}

Cypriano Ferrandini died at the age of 87 in this house on Radnor Avenue in 1910.   I won't go into the details of how I found the house, but in the process I also discovered that his son and namesake bought a house only a few blocks away on Willow Avenue, which has since been demolished for the grounds of the Carter Elementary School
 
 

[DEATH CERTIFICATE]  what we can learn from it (daughter's name, house rented by husband).

Fortunately Cipriano died at the end of a Census year, so I could begin to trace his presence in Maryland backwards decade by decade using that wonderful genealogical service known as Ancestry.com which provides us with all the extant census records accompanied by more or less helpful indexes.

[Census pages]

As you can see from the Census records,  the spelling of Cipriano Ferrandini is erratic, which made the hunt much more difficult that I first thought it might be.

His name is spelled

Siprono Fernandini in 1910
Sip Ferrandine in1900
Cipri Ferrandini in1880
Ciprian Ferrendinie in 1870
Cipri Ferrrandini in 1850

Notice there appears to be no census record for 1860.  There may be a good reason, which we will return to.

[SANBORN plate 49]

Until his first wife Harriet died about 1872,  Cipriano and his family lived in a house his wife owned at  what would today be 1608 East Baltimore Street.
 
 

I could go into great detail about her ownership and his stewardship  of this property, but suffice it to say that tracing the mortages through our new on line service of all Land Records,  it is clear that the property was used for home equity loans, not unlike what we do today.  Every few years as they paid off one mortgage they took out another, on average every six years from 1858 until Harriet's death,  when Cipriano remarried a woman 21 years his junior and moves to Madison Street..  Of all  the mortages, the first is the most interesting.  In 1858, Cipriano borrowed $2,000 on his wife's house from Thomas Winans,  a mortgage that was not released until 1869 when Winans was in Russia building locomotives.  In 1861, of course, Thomas Winans  and his father Ross, would be outspoken secessionists, possibly even aiders and abettors of an effort to invent and raise arms against the North, .if not directly involved in plotting murder.
 

But was Cipriano really a terrorist bent on assassinating President Elect Lincoln in February 1861?

First let's get the facts straight about what happened that day, because accounts are conflicting.

{MAP-scott's]
 

As best I can determine,  The New York Times got it wrong and John Thomas Scharf got it right about the sequence of events on February 23, 1861.  Lincoln did, of course, slouch through town in secret.  That is a given.  But the details surrounding how Mrs. Lincoln and the Children were guarded  have been overlooked in the partisan arguments over the plot.   Marshall Kane did have a plan and it was implemented.  Mrs. Lincoln and the Children did not arrive at the Calvert Street Station to be greeted by a hostile crowd.  There was a hostile crowd there alright,  as the New York Times corresspondent pointed out., but Mrs. Lincoln and the Children were let out of the Train where the tracks crossed Charles Street above the Washington Monument and were whisked to Democrat John Gittings mansion on Mount Vernon Square, where they were treated to a quiet, private dinner, before being taken to Camden Station much later that afternoon.  Whether or not they encountered some unpleasantness at Camden Station is a matter of debate, but Lincoln did not abandon his family to an unprotected journey through a raucous Baltimore.   Marshall Kane,  Southern Sympahthizer and future Confederate General, did his job well on behalf of Mary Todd and the Children.
 

Probably one of the funniest contemporary theories why Lincoln really avoided Baltimore, was to not have to meet with his small but zealous contingent of Republican supporters, but what about the plot?  Was there one and was Cipriano Ferrandini at its head?

First,  let's return to the Pinkerton evidence, such as it is.

{CUTHBERT-TITLE PAGE]

The only purported contemporary account of Pinkerton and his spies is the transcript of his 1861 Journal which he let Herndon copy and which was purchased by Ward Hill Lamon, Lincoln's body guard.  The Cuthbert book makes it very clear that Ward Hill Lamon had little use for Pinkerton and the feeling was mutual,  leading Lamon to at one point discount the existence of any plot,  but if the transcript of Pinkerton's  1861 Journal can be authenticated in any way, perhaps the old saw, where there is smoke there is fire, may prevail.

Pinkerton's account relies upon one agent and two sources to document  Cipriano Ferrandini as the leader of the assassination plot.  His agent meets with Cipriano and leaves a vivid account of his encounter:

[quote the Pinkerton "evidence"]

[Davis Street Plat]

Well, we do know that there was Annette Travis, probably at #70 Davis street providing the services Pinkerton said she provided

[Davis-Bordelo]

It is true that #70 Davis is listed as a Tavern owned by
 

1860 Directory

But there is no question that Ann's Bawdy House was close to the Calvert Street Station.  Indeed someone, if they have not already thought of doing so, should study the Bawdy houses in Baltimore in 1860.  There seemed to be an over abundance of them in the 11th Ward.

But does any of this prove that there was a National Volunteers group led by Cipriano Ferrandini deeply immersed in a plot to assassinate the President Elect?  Pinkerton himself began to doubt the bravado of his prime suspect, or at least so he says long after the fact,  but Cipriano himself leaves us with some clues (if the Congressional Record can be trusted.

18 days before the alledged timing of the terrorist attack on Lincoln, Cipriano Ferrandini appeared before a Congressional Committee of Five investigating rumors that efforts would be made to prevent the President Elect from reaching is inaugural, or if he did manage to get to Washington, seriously disrupt the ceremonies. The committee had been formed at the end of January when the Union appeared to be rapidly dissolving.  Efforts at brokering a compromise were floundering.  Even Lucius E. Crittenden recalled uttering on hearing the news that Lincoln had indeed made it to Washington: "How the devil did he get through Baltimore."
 

Just what did Ferrandini have to say for himself?   For one he suggests that the reason he could not be found when the 1860 census was taken was because he was in Mexico in military training.  For another he certainly makes his seccessionists views very clear and has no problems admitting that he is engaged in applying his military training to a group dedicated to preventing the "Northern Volunteers" from  passing through Maryland.

You can get a flavor of the passion of this 38 year old Corsican Barber.  Can you see him acting on that Passion?  Was he all talk?   Was there a plot?  I don't know if we will ever know for sure.  He certainly traveled in the circles that cried out for Maryland to secede.  His mortage was held by one of the town's purported leading southern sympathizers.  Was the potential for violence defused by the steps taken on the advice of Pinkerton and derived a profile of Ferrandino that he himself drew before a Congressional Committee?

I will leave that for you to ponder, along with an article from the SUN written one hundred years after the alleged plot.  It was discovered by a diligent researcher among massive clippings about Abraham Lincoln in the vertical files of the Enoch Pratt Free Library, Maryland Room..  It is entitled Lincoln and the Baltimore Barber. The True Story of Cipriano Ferrandini and the alleged Assassination Plot of 1861, by Richard Reese and was published on February 26, 1961.