Best Books of 2023 – Chapter 4

Whenever I come across an interesting looking book on my daily BookBub by an author I have never heard of, I usually read the reviews, and this often drives my decision.  This was a most unexpected offering that intrigued me enough to push the purchase button as soon as I read the glowing reviews. This non-fiction book, The Hour of Peril: The Secret Plot to Murder Lincoln Before the Civil War by Daniel Stashower, chronicles a story I had never heard of before.

But rather than starting with Lincoln, the story actually opens with an introduction to Allan J. Pinkerton (yes that Pinkerton), a Scottish immigrant and how he makes the serendipitous transition from being a cooper to founding his own detective agency becoming America’s first “private eye.”  In fact, his company logo with an open eye and the slogan “We Never Sleep” is the genesis for this term referring to a private detective.  Before changing careers, he settled in Dundee Township, IL, starting his own cooperage and being a staunch abolitionist, his cabin became one of the stops on the Underground Railroad.

How Pinkerton’s and Lincoln’s lives became intertwined was a most unusual story.

Not long after Lincoln’s November 1860 election to the presidency, numerous Southern states seceded from the union.  Having been elected with only 40% of the popular vote over several other candidates in a deeply divided Democratic party, Lincoln was initially concerned with the possibility that the Electoral College would not or could not meet and certify the election due to dissenters disrupting the proceedings (doesn’t this ring a bell for the January 6^th events 160 years later?).  But beyond his concern and unknown to Lincoln, was the fact that extremists were plotting to prevent Lincoln from taking the oath of office by preventing him from being able to travel to DC.  To comprehend how this could be possible, one needs to understand how the railroads operated in our country at that time.

In 1860, railroads represented the fastest mode of transportation in our vast country.  Yet there was no single railroad line from Springfield, IL to Washington, DC for Lincoln to take.  Most railroads were owned and operated by disparate rail barons, some staunch Southerners, and their rail lines, named for the cities they connected, competed rather than collaborated with each other.  And many of these rail lines ran through recently seceded Southern states.

Fearing the conspiracies to disrupt Lincoln’s rail journey could include destruction of some of its rail lines, Samuel Morse Felton, the president of the PW & B railroad (Philadelphia, Wilmington & Baltimore) enlisted Allan Pinkerton to go “undercover” to discover and foil plots to destroy parts of his PW & B line.  But Pinkerton along with his “operatives,” his fellow undercover agents, discovered a much more sinister plot—one to assassinate Lincoln in transit.

The train left Springfield, IL on the 11^th of February turning what would have been a 700-mile journey as the crow flies into a 2-week long nearly 2000-mile jaunt.  Lincoln’s birthday the next day passed without any notice given all the well-wishers wanting to greet their new president along the way.  The 13^th was the day the Electoral College met and declared Lincoln officially elected president miraculously without violence.  Over the coming days, Pinkerton’s team continued to try to discover the exact plans so that the assassination could be thwarted and the story alternates between these investigations and the account of Lincoln’s train journey.

I think it would be safe to say that it would not be a spoiler that Lincoln was not assassinated on this journey.  But how the details were eventually unearthed and stopped was an incredible story.  I’m so glad I read this book as I learned so much history and if you chose to, I know you will too.

If you have previously read my annual book blogs, you know that to make up for missing out on reading classics in high school, I read one classic novel each year.  And in every case, there is always a story behind the selection I chose.  But, this year, rather than a classic I failed to read in high school, I reached all the way back to my grade school years when I should have read The Boxcar Children  by Gertrude Chandler Warner.

This book is the one my wife happened to be reading to our granddaughter each night at bedtime on our trip out to California in July.  One night I joined them for the story.  On another night when my wife was losing her voice, I read to our granddaughter.

The book was originally published as The Box-Car Children by Rand McNally in 1924 (100 years ago this year) but a shorter version was published in 1942 by Albert Whitman & Company.  The tattered and worn hardback shown above was printed in 1983 and was discarded by our local library in 1989.  In its current condition, it is obviously showing its 40-year age.

I read this short 154-page book in a single sitting one cold, rainy evening in November.  Oh, what a sweet, sweet story of four young siblings who have lost their parents and have nowhere to live, at least until they come upon an abandoned box car.  I can see how this became such a popular book (and eventually a series of 19 books by the same author) portraying such industrious, pre-depression era young children who manage to purchase food for themselves with the eldest’s earnings from odd jobs and via foraging, turn their box on wheels into a warm and inviting home.  There is even a friendly runaway dog that joins the family acting as a guard dog.

The story also includes caring adults that help make their lives easier and eventually provide more permanent accommodations for them.  I won’t reveal the ending so as not to spoil it for you.  This is the first time I have recommended a children’s book to you but if you chose to read it, I know you will close the book with the same warm happy feeling I felt that night.

I hope you have once again enjoyed reading my best of books for 2023.  If I have piqued your interest enough to read one, then my efforts have been worthwhile.  But if you read one and thoroughly enjoy it as much as I did, then my reading and sharing will have brought pleasure to both of us.  Because there is nothing better than a great book!