On Feb­ru­ary 22, Lin­coln made a stop in Lea­man Place, Penn­syl­va­nia, en route to Har­ris­burg, where a large crowd await­ed him. Despite being too hoarse to speak, he humor­ous­ly intro­duced his wife, trig­ger­ing laugh­ter from the audi­ence. This last pub­lic appear­ance pri­or to Lin­col­n’s secre­tive jour­ney toward Wash­ing­ton height­ened anx­i­eties about his safe­ty, espe­cial­ly regard­ing poten­tial dan­ger in Bal­ti­more, which Sec­re­tary Hay omi­nous­ly hint­ed at. The atmos­phere was heavy with ten­sion as peo­ple wor­ried about the inau­gu­ra­tion just days away.

In Wash­ing­ton, Gen­er­al Scot­t’s sol­diers, num­ber­ing near­ly sev­en hun­dred, occu­pied the streets, armed and ready, which cre­at­ed an atmos­phere of impend­ing dan­ger. While some ques­tioned the neces­si­ty of troop deploy­ments, Pres­i­dent Buchanan insist­ed on main­tain­ing them for pro­tec­tion, fear­ing he might regret inac­tion should any­thing hap­pen.

As that Fri­day night unfold­ed, a sig­nif­i­cant inci­dent took place involv­ing Charles H. Van Wyck, a Repub­li­can con­gress­man from New York, known for his staunch anti-slav­ery stance. He had already drawn the ire of South­ern con­stituents due to a pre­vi­ous speech where he labeled them as cow­ards — a claim that trig­gered numer­ous death threats. Armed for pro­tec­tion, Van Wyck con­tin­ued to speak out against slav­ery on the day Lin­coln trav­eled to Har­ris­burg.

Lat­er that night, as Van Wyck walked through a dark neigh­bor­hood near the Capi­tol, he was attacked by three men, one of whom stabbed him with a bowie knife. For­tu­nate­ly, his heavy over­coat and a fold­ed copy of the Con­gres­sion­al Globe absorbed the blow, pre­vent­ing it from being fatal. In a sur­pris­ing turn of events, Van Wyck fought back, man­ag­ing to shoot one assailant and knock down anoth­er before being struck uncon­scious.

Despite the bru­tal­i­ty of the attack, Van Wyck sur­vived, and its polit­i­cal impli­ca­tions stirred ques­tions over the grow­ing vio­lence against Repub­li­cans. The New-York Times char­ac­ter­ized the inci­dent as a har­bin­ger of omi­nous devel­op­ments fac­ing those in the polit­i­cal are­na, espe­cial­ly regard­ing free speech and safe­ty for out­spo­ken fig­ures in a nation tee­ter­ing toward con­flict.