William H. Whiton and Abraham Lincoln
by Isabelle K. Saveli
There is either more to this story than
meets the eye—or less. Perhaps it is
just a series of unrelated incidents in­
volving William H. Whiton of Piermont
and the assassination of Abraham Lin­
coln. But in the perspective of time there
is implicit in it a story of far greater sig­
nificance—if the historian could only
retrieve some lost links.
In the 1850s, Whiton, a son-in-law of
Eleazar Lord of Piermont, progenitor
and thrice president of the New York
and Erie Railroad, had himself gone into
the railroad business, constructing short
lines in the border states of Kentucky
and Tennessee and in Alabama. He
specialized in bridge building, and the
business, into which he had entered with
his brothers, prospered.
But as the irrepressible conflict be­
tween the North and South drew ever
nearer the flash point, Whiton, a North­
erner by birth, became uneasy and un­
comfortable in the South and returned
North. As both sides recognized, 1860
was the year of decision. There were
four candidates in the Presidential cam­
paign: two irreconcilable Democrats,
Stephen A. Douglas, the spokesman for
“squatters sovereignty,” that is, exten­
sion of slavery into the territories if the
territorial voters wanted it; John C.
Breckenridge, a pro-slavery, states’righter all the way (he would become
Secretary of War in the Confederacy);
John Bell of Tennessee, candidate of the
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Constitutional Union Party (composed,
as Lincoln said, “of the nice exclusive
sort of Whigs”); and Lincoln, the second
Presidential candidate of the newly
formed Republican Party. Its first, un­
successful candidate, John C. Fremont,
would eventually find a last resting place,
thanks to Whiton, in Sparkill’s Rock­
land Cemetery of which Whiton was then
Secretary-Treasurer. But in 1860, Whi­
ton was a Constitutional Union man, a
Bell man, not a Republican.
With Lincoln’s election on November
6, 1860 by less than a popular majority
vote, threats against his life were often
heard. Mercifully, perhaps, the age of
instant communication had not yet ar­
rived so that the country was spared the
cumulative impact of this subcurrent of
malice, and the press dealt with overt
evidence of it on a local basis, sometimes
suppressing it. A number of such threats
had come to Whiton’s ears before he left
Tennessee but, until December of 1860,
he discounted them.
Then he received an especially alarm­
ing letter from A. Anderson, one of his
old colleagues in the railroad business in
Nashville.
After discussing it with Henry J.
Raymond, founder and editor of the New
York Times, he decided to forward it to
the President-elect, who was still winding
up his affairs in Springfield, preparatory
to his inauguration in Washington on
March 4, 1861.