The Hour of Peril

Book 50 of my 2018 Reading Challenge

The Hour of Peril: The Secret Plot to Murder Lincoln Before the Civil War
by Daniel Stashower

Summary (via Goodreads)
In February of 1861, just days before he assumed the presidency, Abraham Lincoln faced a “clear and fully-matured” threat of assassination as he traveled by train from Springfield to Washington for his inauguration. Over a period of thirteen days the legendary detective Allan Pinkerton worked feverishly to detect and thwart the plot, assisted by a captivating young widow named Kate Warne, America’s first female private eye.
As Lincoln’s train rolled inexorably toward “the seat of danger,” Pinkerton struggled to unravel the ever-changing details of the murder plot, even as he contended with the intractability of Lincoln and his advisors, who refused to believe that the danger was real. With time running out Pinkerton took a desperate gamble, staking Lincoln’s life—and the future of the nation—on a “perilous feint” that seemed to offer the only chance that Lincoln would survive to become president.  Shrouded in secrecy—and, later, mired in controversy—the story of the “Baltimore Plot” is one of the great untold tales of the Civil War era, and Stashower has crafted this spellbinding historical narrative with the pace and urgency of a race-against-the-clock thriller.

My Opinion
The title and description are self-explanatory so if you're interested in the topic you will enjoy the book.  It can be a little long at times since we know Lincoln survived but I learned lots that I didn't know before.  

It is interesting to me that we focus so much on the Civil War itself but not much on how long the tension was brewing beforehand and if there are any lessons to apply to our current-day divisiveness.  It is also interesting to consider how different our country could be if the attempts to prevent Lincoln's inauguration had been successful; things had been in motion before him, in spite of history giving Lincoln credit for the entire abolition of slavery, but it definitely would've been a different timeline without him.

A strange thing from the book that didn't involve Lincoln - Pinkerton survived many dangers, including being shot in the back, but died from an infection after tripping and biting his tongue during the fall.

I laughed at the author's note at the beginning about "restoring the original intent" of the detectives' reports and including any profanity they skipped over at the time using "discreet elliptical devices" when recounting conversations.  I made a note of it before reading but now that I'm thinking back and writing this review I can't even remember any outlandish language at all, either because I'm immune and skip over it or what was offensive at that time is pretty tame now; probably a little of both.