Cipriano Ferrandini
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please improve this article if you can. (December 2007) |
 |
This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (April 2008) |
 |
This article or section may contain original research or unverified claims. Please improve the article by adding references. See the talk page for details. (April 2008) |
| Cipriano Ferrandini | |
 Cipriano Ferrandini
|
|
| Born | 1823 Corsica |
|---|---|
| Died | 1910 (Age 87) Baltimore |
| Occupation | Hairdresser, Southern Sympathizer, alleged conspirator |
Cipriano Ferrandini (1823-1910) was a hairdresser from Corsica who emigrated to the United States, and established himself as the long-time barber and hairdresser in the basement of Barnum's Hotel, in Baltimore. There he practiced his trade from the mid 1850s to his retirement long after the close of the Civil War. He was accused, but never indicted for plotting to assassinate President-elect of the United States Abraham Lincoln on February 23, 1861 and while once caught in a secessionist dragnet in 1862, was never prosecuted for his pro-Southern convictions.
On the nights of February 21 and 22, 1861, Allan Pinkerton, a detective Lincoln trusted, and Frederick Seward, son of his greatest Republican rival and soon to be United States Secretary of State, warned Lincoln that he ought not to appear in public in Baltimore as scheduled because plans were afoot to assassinate him.
Lincoln chose to heed the warning, donned a disguise of a soft cap, and passed through Baltimore unseen and unheralded on the night of the 22nd, leaving Mrs. Lincoln and the children to face the crowd awaiting his arrival from Harrisburg the following day, February 23, 1861.
From that day forward, historians have argued over whether or not there was a plot and in the course of their narratives have not only created myths and perpetrated fallacies.
Contents |
[edit] Where historians disagree
Historians fall into two main camps.
There are those who follow the lead of John Thomas Scharf, who had dual careers with the Confederate Navy and Army. He went to great lengths to argue that Baltimoreans would never do anything so ignoble, even though the cause was just. According to Scharf, who spilled more ink than any historian in denial, there simply was no evidence of a plot and after all no one was ever arrested for even contemplating one, although many other good citizens were thrown into jail without benefit of habeas corpus.
The other camp is led by the carefully considered research of William Evitts, who in A Matter of Allegiances based his arguments in favor of their being such a plot on the papers of Allan Pinkerton which The Huntington Library acquired, and which Norma B. Cuthbert edited for publication in 1949. Scharf denied that there were any names associated with the plot. Professor Evitts used Pinkerton's papers (of which the Huntington Library only had transcripts made by Lincoln's friend and biographer William Herndon--the originals apparently were lost in the 1871 Great Chicago Fire) to name Cipriano Ferrandini, a Baltimore hairdresser/barber as the captain of the would-be assassins. Professor Evitts found the Pinkerton evidence convincing, and other historians, like Robert Brugger, have accepted his conclusions, even though they do not mention Ferrandini by name.
[edit] Who was Cipriano Ferrandini?
Because there is a project at the Maryland State Archives to bring all extant vital records in Maryland online, research began with the end to see if there were any records of anyone with such a distinctive name who died in Maryland. Two were found, father and son.
The father, Cipriano Ferrandini died at the age of 87 in the rented house of his daughter and son-in-law on Radnor Avenue, Govans, a Baltimore suburb, in 1910, ironically as a result of botched dental work, by a professional dentist, the successor in profession to barbers who generations before extracted teeth and acted as itinerant surgeons. Cipriano's son and namesake bought a house only a few blocks away on Willow Avenue, which has since been demolished for the grounds of the Carter Elementary School.
Cipriano died at the end of a census year, so his presence in Maryland could be traced backwards decade by decade using census schedules on Ancestry.com which provides all the extant census records accompanied by more or less helpful indexes.
In the census records, the spelling of Cipriano Ferrandini is erratic, which made the hunt much more difficult.
Alternative spellings for his name include include:
- Siprono Fernandini in 1910
- Sip Ferrandine in 1900
- Cipri Ferrandini in 1880
- Ciprian Ferrendinie in 1870
- Cipri Ferrandini in 1850
There appears to be no census record for 1860.
From the eve of the Civil War until his first wife Harriet died about 1872 in a terrible accident reported as far away as New York, Cipriano and his family lived in a house his wife owned at what would today be 1608 East Baltimore Street.
Tracing the mortgages through the on line service of all Land Records makes it clear that the property was used for home equity loans. Every few years as they paid off one mortgage they took out another, on average every six years from 1858 until Harriet's death, when Cipriano remarried a woman 21 years his junior and moved to Madison Street. The first mortgage was taken in 1858 when Cipriano borrowed $2,000 on his wife's house from Thomas Winans. This mortgage was not released until 1869 when Winans was in Russia building locomotives. Thomas Winans and his father Ross were outspoken secessionists, and could have possibly aided and abetted an effort to invent and raise arms against the North, if not directly involved in plotting murder.
[edit] What was Ferrandini's role?
As best as can be determined, The New York Times got it wrong and John Thomas Scharf got it right about the sequence of events on February 23, 1861. Lincoln did move through town in secret. But the details surrounding how Mrs. Lincoln and the children were guarded have been overlooked in the partisan arguments over the plot. Marshall Kane did have a plan and it was implemented. Mrs. Lincoln and the children did not arrive at the Calvert Street Station to be greeted by a hostile crowd. There was a hostile crowd there alright, as The New York Times correspondent pointed out, but Mrs. Lincoln and the children were let out of the train where the tracks crossed Charles Street above the Washington Monument and were whisked to Democrat John Gittings mansion on Baltimore's Mount Vernon Square, where they were treated to a quiet, private dinner, before being taken to Camden Station much later that afternoon. Whether or not they encountered some unpleasantness at Camden Station is a matter of debate, but President-elect Lincoln did not abandon his family to an unprotected journey through a raucous Baltimore. Marshall Kane, Southern sympathizer and future Confederate businessman who may have met with John Wilkes Booth in Canada in 1864, did his job well on behalf of Mary Todd and the children.
[edit] The Pinkerton evidence
The only purported contemporary account of Pinkerton and his spies is the transcript of his 1861 journal which he let Herndon copy and which was purchased by Ward Hill Lamon, Lincoln's bodyguard. The Cuthbert book makes it very clear that Ward Hill Lamon had little use for Pinkerton and the feeling was mutual, leading Lamon to at one point discount the existence of any plot.
Pinkerton's account relies upon one agent and two sources to document Cipriano Ferrandini as the leader of the assassination plot. His agent meets with Cipriano and leaves a vivid account of the extent of the plot as derived from a participant who related the details from the comfort of a Davis Street bawdy house and the arms of an inmate named Annette Travis. She is listed on the 1860 census for Baltimore at #70 Davis Street. Davis street ran south from the Calvert Street train station and appears to have a number of such places in the 11th ward, forming one of the more concentrated 'red light' districts of the city. In his Spy of the Rebellion (1883), p. 64-65, Pinkerton asserts that in addition to his spy Howard, he also met with Captain Ferrandini (whom he calls Fernandina), at Guy's Monument Hotel, which was across the street from Barnum's on Monument Square.
At Guy's, Pinkerton reports that "Fernandina cordially grasped my hand, and we all retired to a private saloon, where after ordering the necessary drinks and cigars, the conversation" turned to the assassination and Ferrandini was asked "Are there no other means of saving the South except by assassination?" "No replied Fernandina, ... He must die -- and die he shall, And, ... if necessary, we will die together." To illustrate his story, Pinkerton included a drawing of himself seated at a table with Ferrandini standing, hand upraised as if clutching a dagger.
| Abraham Lincoln | |
 |
|
| In office March 4, 1861 – April 15, 1865 |
|
|
|
|
| Signature |  |
|---|---|
[edit] Ferrandini's testimony
Pinkerton himself began to doubt the bravado of his prime suspect, or at least so he said long after the fact.
Eighteen days before the alleged timing of the terrorist attack on Lincoln, Cipriano Ferrandini appeared before a Congressional Committee of Five investigating rumors that efforts would be made to prevent the President-elect from reaching his inaugural, or if he did manage to get to Washington, seriously disrupt the ceremonies. The committee had been formed at the end of January when the Union appeared to be rapidly dissolving. Efforts at brokering a compromise were floundering. Even Lucius E. Crittenden recalled that on hearing the news that Lincoln had indeed made it to Washington, a Missouri colleague at the Washington Peace Conference exclaimed: "How the devil did he get through Baltimore?" Crittenden speculated that clearly more than Italian (did he mean Corsican?) assassins and Plug Uglies must have known of the plots to keep Lincoln from being inaugurated. If the upper levels of Baltimore and Washington society knew of any such plot, they probably learned about it at the Maryland Club. As Robert Brugger discovered, in July 1860, a Colonel Cipriani from Corsica dined at the club as a guest of J. N. Bonaparte, Napoleon's nephew. The Maryland Club was clearly a hotbed of Southern sympathy, and had a remarkable guest list of Rebels and Copperheads, until closed down by Union Troops.
Ferrandini told the Committee of Five the following February that the reason he could not be found when the 1860 census was taken was because he was in Mexico in military training, and he made his secessionists views very clear and had no problems admitting that he is engaged in applying his military training to a group dedicated to preventing the "Northern Volunteers" from passing through Maryland.
The Congressional Record shows that he traveled in the circles that supported the secession of Maryland. His mortgage was held by one of the town's purported leading southern sympathizers.
[edit] See also
- Baltimore Plot
- American Civil War spies
- Allan Pinkerton
- Kate Warne
- Ward Hill Lamon
- George Proctor Kane
- Hattie Lawton
- Cipriano Ferrandini
[edit] References
- Cuthbert, Norma Barrett (ed.). Lincoln and the Baltimore Plot, 1861. (1949)
- Evitts, William J., A Matter of Allegiances- Maryland from 1850-1861(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,1974)
- Pinkerton, A. (1883). The Spy of the Rebellion; being a true history of the spy system of the United States Army during the late rebellion. Revealing many secrets of the war hitherto not made public. Comp. from official reports prepared for President Lincoln, General McClellan and the provost-marshal-general. New York, G.W. Carleton & Co.
