Lincoln receives anonymous threat

Lincoln meets NYC Mayor Fernando Wood

• On his grand trip toward his inauguration as the sixteenth President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln arrives in New York City to a quarter million well-wishers, a significant development in the home state of New York Senator William Seward who was his rival for the Republican nomination. Lincoln has since wisely appointed Seward his Secretary of State for his new Administration. 

But not everyone in town is happy. Lincoln meets New York City Mayor Fernando Wood who only recently remarked that he wished the city could secede from the Union and apologized to Robert Toombs for his inability to restrain the New York police from seizing Georgia rifles in the port. And who would have ever imagined that a Mayor of New York City would make several rude comments to the President-elect? He does, but Lincoln ignores them as he does also an invitation from P.T. Barnum to tour his museum. Lincoln’s wife, Mary, and sons, Robert and Willie, though, living it up in New York City, take Barnum up on his offer.

Lincoln instead met with his Vice President Hannibal Hamlin for the first time since just after the election in Chicago . During his stay in New York City, Lincoln receives an anonymous threat. It reads, “Feb 20, 1861  Mr. Lincoln -  May the hand of the devil strike you down before long - you are destroying this country.  Dam you - every breath you take -  Hand of God against you.”/1861

• In Montgomery, Alabama, the provisional Confederate government establishes the Department of the Navy, but with no ships, the department is more of an abstract idea. Secretary of the Navy-designate Stephen Mallory has an arduous task ahead of him. The Provisional Congress also gives President Davis power to make contracts for the manufacture and purchase of war goods, certain that the new radical US President-elect Lincoln will probably prosecute war against the South/1861

• Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard Beauregard, recently removed after a few days as Superintendent at West Point simply for being a Southerner, resigns his commission in the United States Army./1861