evidence: At noon on Monday, March 4, 1861—a day that observers noted had dawned "cloudy and raw" but turned bright and warm—Abraham Lincoln emerged from the 14th Street NW door of Willard’s Hotel, accompanied by President James Buchanan. The two men rode together in an open carriage up Pennsylvania Avenue, bound for the covered platform that had been erected on the East Front for the presidential Inauguration. Double files of cavalrymen escorted the procession to the Capitol. Cross streets had been closed to secure the route in the event of attack. Sharpshooters were stationed on rooftops along the avenue, "with orders," an officer recalled, "to watch the windows on the opposite side, and to fire upon them in case any attempt should be made to fire from those windows on the presidential carriage." [...] Lincoln’s own sensibility—both moral and political—was founded on this injunction. "As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master," he once said. "This expresses my idea of democracy." For Lincoln, a world in which power was all, in which the assertion of a singular will trumped all, in which force dictated all, was not moral but immoral, not democratic but autocratic, not just but unjust.