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Fascinating Civil War Facts that Won’t be in the History Books

Khalid Elhassan February 8, 2021 33 min

Battle of Fort Sanders - American Civil War — Confederates in action during the Civil War. Buyenlarge Archive Photos

7. Presidential Security Was Astonishingly Lax Before, During, and For Decades After the Civil War

Abraham Lincoln in 1863. Library of Congress

Throughout much of America’s history, keeping the country’s chief executives safe was very much an ad hoc affair. The Secret Service, created in 1865 to fight currency counterfeiting, was not tasked with protecting presidents until 1902, after the McKinley assassination. Before that, security for US presidents was astonishingly lax, and attitudes towards the safety of the Oval Office’s occupants were pretty blasé. For example, on the night Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, April 14^th, 1865, only one man had been assigned to protect him: an inept and unreliable cop named John Frederick Parker.

Lax presidential security persisted despite earlier warnings. In 1835, for example, an attempt to assassinate President Andrew Jackson failed only because the would-be assassin’s pistols misfired. Lincoln himself was quite cavalier about his personal safety, despite numerous threats and hate mail. In 1861 a plot was uncovered that sought to murder him in Baltimore. In 1864, while riding at night unguarded, an unknown sniper fired a rifle shot that missed the president’s head by inches and pierced his hat.

Also Read: The Anarchist that Killed President William McKinley Changed the Presidency Forever.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.