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All aboard: Obama family taking train to District
By: Leah Fabel
Examiner Staff Writer
December 16, 2008
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At least, there will be less time for anything to go awry. As opposed to Lincoln’s two-week trek in 1861, Obama’s journey will begin and end on Jan. 17, setting off from Philadelphia and making a stop in Wilmington, Del., to pick up Vice President-elect Joseph Biden Jr. and his family, and a stop in Baltimore for an unspecified event. The entourage, aboard a chartered train, will arrive in the District in the evening.
“The cities have obvious symbolic importance,” said Kevin Griffis, a spokesman for Obama’s inaugural committee. “They’re starting from the place where our Constitution and Bill of Rights were both crafted, and Baltimore was the site of a battle that’s enshrined in the Star-Spangled Banner.”
Griffis also emphasized the committee’s focus on coordinating “as accessible and open an inauguration as has ever been held,” explaining that people who may not have a place to stay in Washington, or the endurance to battle the crowds, could still experience a piece of the festivities en route.
But festive was hardly the tone during Lincoln’s journey on the brink of the Civil War.
“He wasn’t exactly coming into Washington in triumph, because there were serious concerns for his safety,” said Michael Fitzgerald, an American history professor at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minn.
A Feb. 16, 1861, article in the Lafayette (Ind.) Journal described a sabotaged railway “that if a train run at full speed had struck it, the engine and cars must have been thrown off and many persons killed.”
Further north in Syracuse, Ind., security discovered “a grenade of the most destructive character” in a carpetbag stashed in the rear of Lincoln’s car. “Attention was drawn to it by the fact that no baggage was allowed in the cars,” the article said.
And upon reaching the then-slave state of Maryland, detectives from the Pinkerton agency ushered the president-elect through in hiding. Fitzgerald pointed to a famous cartoon by Southern sympathizer Adalbert Volck portraying a terrified Lincoln hiding out in the train’s cattle car.
Expecting a safe arrival, however, Fitzgerald said Obama could “gain some mileage” from following in Lincoln’s path in the bicentennial year of his birth.
“By wrapping himself in the mantle of racial justice, and associating with all of the accomplishments of Lincoln,” Fitzgerald said, “That’s all to the good if Obama can make that connection plausible.”
