After providing some historical context, Miller introduces us to the assassination plot in Chapter 6 set on April 11, 1861, when two South Carolina planters, Langston Bennett and Tucker Hughes, hire an elusive, all-business Latin-American gunman. He reluctantly and cryptically reveals his name, Mazorca. A loyal house slave, Lucius, overhears the plan and believes Lincoln will free his entire class, develops his own plan to save the president. Meanwhile back in Washington, Colonel Charles P. Rook feverishly seeks out such threats in order to protect the president, against his superior’s priorities.
Miller develops his characters well, both historic and fictional, particularly in perfecting their dialects. The genteel Bennett is the perfect patrician planter. His slaves’ exchanges are real and show their desperation. He presents Washington military and state officialdom in so to understand both military officers and bureaucrats. Secretary of State William Seward, Lincoln’s secretary, John Hay, and General Winfield Scott are major characters.
Langston Bennett represents the southern way of life and intense resentment to Lincoln’s ascendancy. The reader gets to know the peg-legged Bennett as a patriarch gone mad. Bennett’s relationship with Lucius, his most trusted servant, dates back to his adolescence and is revealed in a flashback. As his father trained Bennett to oversee slaves he orders his son to whip Lucius to break him into submission. The youthful Bennett refused, “No father, I cannot do it---and I will not do it.” Within a week, the elder Bennett sold Lucius to a nearby plantation. Years later upon his father’s death and upon his inheritance of the estate, the younger Bennett immediately re-purchases Lucius who becomes his loyal aide.
Lucius violates their trust, however, when he convinces his granddaughter Portia, an attractive seventeen-year-old mulatto, to escape and travel to Washington to inform Lincoln of the plot. A strong male slave, Joe, joins Portia on the mission.
Miller tells the story chronologically with each chapter entitled by date covering staggered events at the Bennett plantation, on the slaves’ backwoods escape, and in the capital where Mazorca gets closer to completing the contract. All this while Rook frustratingly tries to convince General Scott of the urgency to protect the president.
Miller addresses many issues of plantation life, like the awkward but understood master-slave relationship. He provides titillating encounters between Hughes and Portia. The central theme, however, is the struggle to protect the president in an unprepared 1861 America. It’s hard to imagine the casual approach to presidential security in Civil War-time Washington in hindsight against modern terror threats. The conspirators’ plan is very plausible. Job seekers and bureaucrats daily roamed the Executive Mansion grounds. According to Lincoln biographer David Herbert Donald, the president strolled the White House lawn nightly, had no military guard, and but two civilian attendants often absent from their posts.
The author contextualizes with the Baltimore Plot, a real, spoiled assassination attempt on Lincoln en route to his inaugural, in the opening pages to show the real dangers and to show Col. Rook’s developing concern for Lincoln’s safety. The Baltimore Plot was foiled when Lincoln’s aides got word and altered his travel schedule. At the inauguration, Rook was in charge of inauguration security and quickly becomes the voice of reason on the president’s safety.
Later Miller juxtaposes the threat with the lackadaisical security brought on by Lincoln himself and his chief officers. General Scott appears in The First Assassin as an aloof, obese commander of the capital who disbelieves serious threats to his commander in chief. Scott, who had known presidents from Jefferson to Lincoln, was at the end of his fifty-year career, overweight and nearly spent. He would retire within the year, and die at war’s end. Ironic, though, that historian Donald tells us it was General Scott who helped convince Lincoln and his entourage to alter travel plans for the Baltimore threat.
Miller plays to contemporary security issues while demonstrating officials in 1861 faced similar dilemmas; how to act on hunches, could the US Government use enhanced interrogation tactics to acquire sensitive information? Where does habeas corpus fall in an ill-defined war? At one point an overzealous Colonel Rook spies on four suspicious men spotted snooping around the new Capitol Building. He later arrests them when found with kegs of gunpowder ala the 1605 Gunpowder Plot to explode Parliament. When these men challenged Rook’s evidence and the fairness of their arrest, he responds, “As far as you’re concerned, my word is the law.” Even when his own assistants agree with the prisoners’ claims, Rook detains these suspects not in the newly-designated makeshift prison in the Old Capitol, but instead in the Treasury Department. “Keep all of this to yourself,” Rook tells his sergeant (193).
Rook’s dubious wartime law enforcement and national security philosophy tempts him to use Guantanamo-style tactics. When the men refuse to divulge information Rook is confident, “After a day or two of sleeping on the floor and hoping that we’ll bother to feed them, they prove more cooperative.” The author tells us that “Rook was running a rogue operation, without General Scott’s knowledge or approval—a clandestine program…to counteract the complacency of his superior officers.” (209)
It is against this backdrop that Rook seeks out Mazorca around the capital city, and Portia and Joe get closer to Lincoln while eluding Hughes, an overseer, and vicious dogs. In many ways The First Assassin is your standard thriller—a mix of intrigue, death, heroics, a little sex, and suspense. And it is a thriller for the hardened reader. Deadly encounters occur from South Carolina to the capital, all of which the author competently maps for the reader. Miller is also skilled at leaving transitional events to the imagination.